Dr. Smiti Nathan

Transcript

Smiti: [00:00:00]Welcome to Curiosity Meets the Past, a podcast for curious minds who love learning about the past. My name is Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist and your host. In this episode, I’m speaking with linguist and writer Dr. Danny Bate. In our conversation, we’re diving into the past of the English alphabet, which Danny extensively researched for his new book, Why Q Needs U: A History Of Our Letters And How We Use Them.

Now, if you haven’t read it, don’t worry. You won’t need it to follow along. But when it comes to the book, one of the things that I found so fascinating was that one of Danny’s most important sources, and one that he references a lot, is the archaeological record. So that’s gonna anchor our conversation, and Danny starts us off by sharing why there’s archaeology in his book and one particularly memorable artifact.

Danny Bate: There’s a lot of [00:01:00] archaeology in the book, first and foremost, uh, uh, because I love archaeology. Who doesn’t? It’s great And because when researching the history of the alphabet, you have to get stuck into archaeological sites and finds, and these finds are, are really precious. They’re very few and far between.

If one sticks in the memory for lots of different reasons, it would be this wonderful thing. It’s an old comb that has survived down the centuries, making it, uh, probably, well, close to 4,000 years old now, found in a site in the, the Levant, a site called Lachish. And the Lachish comb bears an inscription in early alphabetic writing, and I love it for several reasons.

The first is that it’s just really old, and you can see this very rare glimpse into the alphabet’s history, where the letters still look like things. They still look like objects and like their original hieroglyphic prototypes, but they’re on their way towards simplification, abstraction, and basically becoming letters.

This is an [00:02:00] intermediary stage. So that’s really helpful because sometimes the original Egyptian hieroglyph is not particularly obvious, and you really have to go, “Okay. Well, what does the Lachish comb tell us?” Um, another thing that I love about this very short inscription is that it’s actually understandable.

Uh, we know what it says. It’s about, uh, basically like a prayer or a sort of a wish that the comb will do its job and root out lice from people’s beards. And that is a wonderfully ordinary inscription, a very down-to-earth thing, which tells us a great deal about who is writing and who is, you know, using this ancient system.

It’s probably quite ordinary people. So the alphabet takes off. It clearly is, uh, fulfilling a need where people like, “I love this new system. It’s working really well for me,” in a very short space of time. It’s one of the oldest inscriptions that we have. And finally, the comb worked because you can do radio scanning, microscope scanning on this comb, and there are the remnants of ancient lice.

Smiti: So it actually did its [00:03:00] job. Whether that’s the inscription’s fault or the, uh, or thanks to the comb, I don’t know, but it’s a great text for all sorts of reasons. Despite being so humble, it’s a real monument in the history of the alphabet. Absolutely, and honestly, that was one of my favorite archaeological examples from the book.

It just brought together so many different sources of information that you could extract from, like, this one object, which I think is one of the superpowers of archaeology. But you mentioned you really enjoy archaeology, but that is not your background. So you are a linguist and academically trained, and as a fellow academic, I know there’s a lot of things you could study.

Danny Bate: What was it about the English alphabet that made you decide, “Okay, I want to focus on this for this book”? Yeah. I suppose because the book is, uh, a contribution to public linguistics, so it’s about taking my beloved field out of universities and sharing it with as many people as, as possible, basically [00:04:00] anyone who’ll listen, uh, that’s, that’s my ideal audience.

It, it mattered to me, of course, that I had to meet the audience at their door. I had to think of something that would grab people. And in my years of academic training, I’ve covered lots of different things. Linguistics is a broad church. Uh, my PhD is in word order, for example, so the syntax of very old languages.

And so many of the things that make my nerdy heart sing, they’re not gonna grab people off the, straight off the bookshelves in your local Waterstones if you’re in the UK, or Barnes & Noble if you’re in the US. It’s not gonna appeal to people that you might have to do more work, and therefore you might lose more people.

But the alphabet, the thing that we crucially remember learning, unlike, say, word order, which is basically learned at a pre-memory stage of, uh, of infancy. Um, we remember learning the alphabet. We remember going through these, uh, problems. So it’s sort of conscious. It sort of exists in our, uh, psyche, this thing, and yet of course it [00:05:00] is so successful that we tend not to think about it so much.

Once you’ve learned the alphabet, off you go, writing, jotting things down, using it until your dying day. So I felt that it was a perfect middle ground between something that people have opinions about and have memories of already, but nonetheless would like to know more about, and I felt that the alphabet was just this, uh, this perfect way in to, let’s face it, a lot of linguistics and a lot of archeology.

Smiti: Absolutely. And I do think that the way you handled such diverse sources was really well executed. And I really appreciate that you didn’t mind getting into academic terminology, and I personally think it was well explained and it made sense. And before we dive into some archaeological examples, I would love for you to just give us a quick chat about your logic behind including academic terms for, you know, a book that is intended for broader public audiences.

Danny Bate: Yeah. [00:06:00] Um, that fits within my personal mission. That was something that’s very important to me. It’s not the perfect way. It’s not the only way to go about doing these things, and I’ve read books that, uh, that achieve, uh, the same goal with the opposite technique by actually avoiding these deliberate terminology and deliberate jargon.

But I feel that if you embrace the jargon, let’s use that word, I don’t mean it in a bad way, but let’s… If you em- let’s say, if you embrace specific terminology, you gain many things, and it’s not something to be dismissed out of hand. One thing that you gain, of course, is precision. These terms exist for a reason.

There’s a reason why experts prefer them over some more roundabout way of saying the same thing, in that you save on word space, you don’t maybe bore your reader by using all the same things over and over again or reaching for quite convoluted, strained phrasing. So there is, uh, that, that’s one thing to be gained.

Another is, of course, that you feel… as a reader, you can feel like you’re on board. You’ve been brought into a, a field, a topic. You’re up to [00:07:00] speed with where the experts are, and you’re not being patronized. Nobody wants to be patronized. It’s a real fine line to walk between explaining all of these terms and patronizing.

I cannot ever claim to have got it 100% right. It is an art, not a science. But nonetheless, it matters to me because of those benefits and, and so that, uh, the reader comes away with concepts that equip them. They’re now ready for more linguistics and more language and pursuing their own adventures in historical language and archaeology.

Smiti: So all of these things, it, it matters to me very much. It’s part of the vocation of sharing the field with everyone. Gotcha. I love that. So let’s get into some archaeological examples. Okay. Now, you mentioned the comb, which I absolutely love, and I was curious if there was another example that maybe you found surprising as you were doing your research.

Danny Bate: Oh, I mean, there’s one that sticks in the memory. Oh, there’s, there’s one that haunts my dreams. So the thing is, the, the book Why Quino Needs You is, uh, [00:08:00] organized alphabetically. So it goes from chapter A through to chapter Zed/Zee I acknowledge that. That’s part of the, uh, the chapter’s content at the very end.

But the, the hardest one for me personally to write about was chapter A. Being first in the alphabet, I use it as the first chronologically to talk about where the alphabet ultimately comes from. For, it, it just worked out perfectly for so many reasons, almost spooky how well the alphabet, uh, accidentally suits that structure.

And, uh, the thing is, because it’s the early stage, the sources are few and the debates are great. There are lots of academics, lots of real experts, and I had to wander into this field, understand it, summarize it, make it entertaining, make it accessible, and, um, that took a lot of time, took a lot of effort.

And eventually it was a, a good friend of mine in the Netherlands who was able to kind of sign off on a first draft and say, “This is good to go,” and I could continue on to chapter B. But I was on the bus like a month later and I get one of those Google News [00:09:00] alerts, and there’s an article from something like Scientific American, and it says, “Find that threatens alphabetic history discovered in Syria.”

God, it’s a complete gut punch. And I’m sprawling my way, devouring every single word in this very limited number of articles about this find. It’s a simple, uh, ceramic cylinder. It’s very short. There, there’s not much like it. And I’ve only been able to access a handful of pictures of this thing. And I have to admit, if I’m allowed a sort of, um, amateurish semi-expert intuition, it doesn’t seem right.

Something seems off about it from the few pictures I’ve seen. The, the symbols seem a little bit too abstract. They don’t seem to be completely in tune with the other finds that we have from that absolute primal stage of the alphabet’s development. But nonetheless, we have very few finds, and yet we can nonetheless still talk about the balance of evidence.

And the balance of evidence is still [00:10:00] shifted towards Egypt and Sinai for the ultimate birthplace of the alphabet. And this find Deserves respect, but n- we don’t have enough information yet to allow it to make such a big impact and to kind of be this, uh, stick of intellectual dynamite and blow up the story and lead us to redesign it so far.

It could happen because, as it taught me, this is a field in flux. So what are we dealing with? Well, are we dealing with a fake? That’s, you know, the specter that haunts a lot of archeology. I can’t say that. I cannot comment on, uh, the, the status of this find. I also don’t know about its provenance, so that matters as well.

So you know, how, how reliable, where can we trace it back to? I do feel that we may be looking at something else. We may be looking at a different kind of writing system ultimately. If so, fantastic. If not, and it’s alphabetic history, also fantastic. I’ll just, I don’t know, I’ll write a second edition.

Smiti: That sounds great.

And I really appreciate you sharing that, and I think [00:11:00] many academics or anyone who’s done some research can absolutely empathize with that feeling.

Danny Bate: Mm-hmm.

Smiti: But you did mention something else as you were speaking about the major players, and you mentioned ancient Egypt. And one of the things I appreciated about the book was that other past societies showed up who maybe weren’t thought of as ancient major players, but played a significant role.

Would you mind talking about one of them and how that impacted your perspective and work?

Danny Bate: I would not mind. I talk about them with great pleasure, so yeah, sure. You’ve got a, a sort of cast of characters in the alphabet’s history, the ancient history specifically, who sort of… Pass the parcel’s not the right phrase.

They, they accept the parcel and then give it on and also keep it for themselves of course ’cause when the alphabet moves around the ancient world, it doesn’t just abandon where it currently was. So, uh, the alphabet makes its way in a sort of anti-clockwise motion, and there are the big players, the famous members of the cast.

So your Phoenicians and your Greeks [00:12:00] and ancient Romans and things like that. They’re well-known characters in ancient history, and their contribution is also fairly well known. But you have cultures that are somehow separate that are also making contributions. I, I’ll give the example of two, uh, one which is more relevant to English.

The first is that you have the incredible city of Ugarit, so that is in what is today the coastal part of Syria that, uh, it’s an abandoned site. There’s no kind of, you know, later settlement. And this people of Ugarit seem to be distinct from the Canaanites to the south. People, you know, that would’ve included the Phoenicians seem to be somehow distinct, somehow speaking a different language.

And what they do with the alphabet is just fascinating. They seem so creative in that they are taking cuneiform from the East, and they’re taking this, uh, new alphabetic system ultimately from Egypt, but coming from the south, from Canaan, and merging the two together and in the process providing us with a lot of- Really, really valuable information about the alphabet’s order, [00:13:00] the order of the letters that is, about, uh, the way that the alphabet’s used.

So these smaller, maybe in a, you know, population sense or a geography sense, civilizations also are part of the story. It’s not this simple thread. You’ve got a great variety of writing going on. The one that’s more relevant to English, of course, is a little bit later in time, which is in Iron Age Italy as the Etruscans.

Of course, anybody who, who loves archeology will love the Etruscans. They’re great. They’re fascinating. They’re an enigma, of course, in terms of, uh, where they come from I can speak to the, uh, difficulty in studying Etruscan as a historical linguist. Uh, where does it come from? It’s not an orphan. It’s not like, say, uh, Basque in that Etruscan does have a family of related languages, but it’s, it’s all very, very complicated.

But the thing that makes it relevant for the alphabet’s history is that when the alphabet arrives in Italy, Italy defined, you know, on a macro scale, it’s not just a sort of easy spread. You have an [00:14:00] imbalance of power. You have p- the top dogs, and you have the underdogs in Italy at this time, and the, the Etruscans are top dogs.

Politics, power, all of these things are going into the alphabet’s early years in ancient Italy, and this leaves a legacy because it’s not right to just straightforwardly say that the Greeks give the alphabet to the Romans. They don’t. It needs to be transmitted through the prism of the Etruscans. The Etruscans are the people who take it and make it their own, the first people to kind of create a distinctly Italian version of the alphabet that’s, uh, a departure from the Greek, and this is then what the Romans are using.

They’re taking the shape of the letters, what letters are included, what letters are c- being combined together. Early Latin, our first sources for the Latin language, looks very Etruscan in the way that it’s written down. But only when Rome is able to, uh, let’s say, escape the, the shadow of the Etruscans do they start to create a Latin alphabet or a Roman alphabet.

That’s something [00:15:00] that comes later. The best example of this is the letter C. The letter C, third letter of the alphabet, it used to be gamma, standing for a g sound, as in girl or go, and it’s the Etruscans, because of their distinctive language, that turn it into a c sound, a, a sort of voiceless c sound.

Same part of the, of the mouth, but there’s no voicing in the throat. That is, to this day, the quality of the letter C. It’s a voiceless letter. That’s an Etruscan legacy right there in the alphabet, and they, they have to be included when you’re telling the story.

Smiti: Absolutely, and I really appreciated just learning the backstories of various letters like C, and perhaps a relationship with K there, too.

And, you know, as we go through the alphabet, if you have a little bit of intellectual curiosity or shower thoughts, as I like to say, you’re like, “Okay, why do we have certain redundant sounds? Why is this letter here?” And so it got my curiosity going even more because [00:16:00] I was wondering, okay, what was Danny’s favorite letter and least favorite letter as he wrote this book?

So would you mind sharing?

Danny Bate: That’s, that’s a tricky one. That’s a tricky question to answer, I have to admit. This is the paradox of the linguist. The linguist is, you know, supposed to have this sort of neutral perspective, but of course, all linguists are, for the time being, human, and we have our foibles, we have our, uh, preferences, and sure, some letters of the alphabet interest me more, delight me more, I could say.

So in terms of interest, I have a great fondness for a story of H, so that, that early on in the alphabet, in that because it’s connected early on to this very weak sound, it’s literally just a bit of breathiness in your larynx, this huh sound, that can be so easily dropped from any language. Uh, it can be dropped in some places, it can be dropped across the board, as happens in some accents of English, most famously [00:17:00] the London accent.

If people have seen My Fair Lady, “I gains ‘ardly ever ‘appen in ‘Ampshire,” that sort of thing. Because of that, the letter can find itself without a distinctive sound to spell, and therefore can be repurposed. It can either be given to a new sound or it can be partnered up with other sounds to spell something else.

So consequently, in English today, we’ve definitely leaned into using H to spell more sounds than the basic alphabet is equipped for. It’s the C-H sound in ch, right? So the S-H sound, sh, T-H, th, um, and so on and so on. It’s, it’s all going back to one Greek ancestor and just going down different paths because the sound is sort of so phonetically fragile.

It can be lost so easily. Um, so I do like H. For the same reasons, I like R. I like R in that it looks like the sort of pictogram originally depicted, which is a head. Uh, the name for R originally would’ve been something like, uh, rosh or, uh, rash. Honestly, quite hard to say how that would’ve been [00:18:00] pronounced.

Probably more like ras. And, and you know, if you know Hebrew, you’ll know that like rosh is the word for head. So it looks like a head and it’s named a head originally. And I love that it goes on this great journey. It gains an extra leg in Italy, uh, the sort of the leg of capital R. And of course, it’s a great window into the divided nature of English right nowadays.

Do we pronounce all the Rs? Do you pronounce them in a word like car? Is it car, as it is for a lot of Americans and Canadians, or is it car, a single vowel, as it is for me? English is divided and the letter R is ancient and somehow managing to keep all of that speech somewhat unified. So it has my respect for that.

As for letters I don’t like, let’s face it, it’s Q. Come on. Well

Smiti: Yeah, I think that was very clear in the book, which, uh, gave me a chuckle as I was reading that chapter. But can you explain why Q is maybe not your favorite to folks who haven’t read the book yet?

Danny Bate: Yeah. [00:19:00] Unlike every other letter of the alphabet, Q is more or less unable to stand on its own.

It relies on U, the letter that is. Of course, uh, it also relies on you personally in that you have a choice to keep using it. We all do. It’s not forced on us. It’s a matter of practice and consensus. And Q kind of has my begrudging respect because it is very old. It’s part of the original gang of the alphabet.

It goes all the way back to that early Middle Eastern Egyptian point in time. But quite early on in the story, as it’s handed on to the Greeks, it stops standing for a distinctive sound, and it’s in the hands of the Romans that it’s kind of definitively partnered up with U, in that the Romans use it to spell a kind of qua sound different from cuh.

And because it’s different- Q can stick around. It can, in conjunction with U, it can be used to spell this distinctive sound that we might think of as two separate sounds, but for the Romans it’s just one, as in [00:20:00] a word like quis, who in Latin. But nonetheless, it is this kind of enfeebled letter. There’s not much we can do about it, with the exception of course with more recent arrivals in English.

So you do have, uh, say, you know, words arriving from China, from the Pinyin script of Chinese, concepts like qi, which are written with Q, uh, also the QWERTY keyboard, a modern invention, and of course words that are transliterating Arabic. So there’s a handful of words that are maybe revitalizing U and giving it a distinctive sound, but even still in English it’s a C sound, and most often it’s a combined sequence of qua.

We could still get rid of it.

Smiti: Well, hey, I appreciate you being forthright about your biases. And as an archeologist, we know that the archaeological record is inherently biased based on what preserves. So we’re not getting, you know, a representative sample of what life was like or a place was like in the past.

It’s, it’s down to preservation conditions and honestly [00:21:00] in a lot of cases, luck. Is there an archaeological find that would be top on your wish list of, you know, hey, if we found this, this would answer a lot of questions or maybe add richly to the story of the alphabet?

Danny Bate: Oh, yeah. There are some. I, I love puzzles.

I love mysteries. I don’t think that’s in any way unusual for the linguistically and archaeologically-minded. However, if there is one that, uh, really appeals to me, it would be specific finds in some sort of alphabetic variant, specifically from northern Italy or southern Germany/Austria/Switzerland. And why I say this is because We are so close to being able to connect the alphabetic family tree to one that is very well known, if not commonly used today, which is runes, runic writing.

[00:22:00] Okay? Uh, runes, which people may know from, you know, the Vikings and from, you know, Tolkien and stuff like that. And it’s a very evocative writing system, but it is ultimately an alphabet. But the thing is, we just have missing links in the chain. We can be so confident that it is in some way connected to our alphabet.

It’s an offshoot branch, but where exactly its branch connects to the wider family tree is not at all clear. I think I’m in line with the current consensus in believing that the connecting point, the nexus, is Northern Italy. So Etruscan writing or the scripts of the Alps that are being used before the Romans and Latin just washes over everybody, um, in…

We’re still in the years BC. And it makes just a simple jump. It’s carried by these languages and these speakers. I don’t know, someone like the, the Rhaetians of the Alps, and it’s carried over the Alps, and there it meets with Celtic and Germanic languages and their [00:23:00] speakers. And of course, we’ve got some shifts.

Maybe we’ve got letters being invented or being changed in their shape or changed in the way that they’re used to, but we’re so close to being able to grasp runes in one hand and the rest of the family tree in another and pull really hard. We’ve got it down to about, about Two centuries in terms of a time gap to explain in terms of the last non-Latin Italian scripts in northern Italy and the first runic inscriptions, what’s known as the Elder Futhark, the first version of runes.

In terms of geography, the lower half of Germany and Austria, we’ve got to cover that. And in terms of time, we’ve got the centuries either side of the year one, right? 1 AD. And if only we could find something within that gap that could, would allow us to connect the two. Come on, we can do it.

Smiti: It’s close archaeologically speaking, so I really hope that both of us get a [00:24:00] notification on our phone or email that a find of that sort has been uncovered in the coming years.

So I’m curious then, you know, you had to engage with a lot of different sources, as we mentioned before. How has that shaped you or transformed you as a scholar?

Danny Bate: Ooh, it certainly has. There is a, a feeling that I’m just not the same person as I was when I started out on this journey, and that’s for the best.

So the big change does feel gradual, incremental. I, I was engaging with more sources. I was aware of more debates and more scholars than I was previously. Um, the things that are bigger and maybe more, uh, let’s say, uh, widescale in their scope, it would be my attitude towards the alphabet in general and my attitude towards spelling.

I think I previ- previously would’ve aligned myself more towards, “Yeah, let’s, let’s reform it.” But there are so many aspects now of spelling that are… They’re not phonemic, they’re not about sounds, but they are [00:25:00] there. They’re ongoing in the way that we read and the way that we write. So our computation of words as chunks of meaning rather than sequences of simple sounds.

I think all of that is, is by accident now part of English spelling and, and that does us credit when we consider these alternative ways of reading. It’s not just about simply reading and remembering sounds and, and words composed of those sounds. And secondly, this is the big one, the drastic one. If we get rid of standard English spelling- Is that the end of the English language?

In the same way that the weakening of written Latin was in many ways the disintegration of Latin and new descendants, what we call the Romance family, French, Italian, Catalan, Romanian, Spanish, Italian, they, they come to the surface, they come to the fore, they’re able to s- establish themselves, to crawl out from under Latin’s shadow.

If we get rid of this, uh, standard spelling, which is more or less keeping English united under one banner, is it the end of one language? [00:26:00] After that point, are we talking about the Anglian languages, and English becomes relegated to history and to certain uses and to the past at that point?

Smiti: Well, I think what’s coming through to me, and especially in the closing of your book, is a sense of wonder, curiosity, and appreciation, and openness about how our past shapes where we’re currently at.

And yes, there are rules and logic, but we don’t necessarily need to be so hard about them. Mm-hmm. But it’s important to understand where they’re coming from. So as we close out our conversation, what do you hope listeners take away from the history and archeology of the English alphabet?

Danny Bate: Hard to say, as in hard to narrow it down to just one thing.

The point I am gonna go with ultimately is That we’re part of it. We today think that when we’re an [00:27:00] exception, we exist a- above, apart from time. Every generation thinks that they’ve made it, right? There’s very few generations that you can point to and think, “Oh, they really believe that they weren’t it,” in some way, right?

But that’s just not true. We are living through an era of the alphabet’s history with distinct qualities, features that linguists, archeologists, uh, historians of the future will recognize and pick up on and say, “That’s 21st century English,” in the way that we spell, in the way that we make mistakes, or indeed don’t make mistakes, in that our language is so standardized, increasingly standardized like it’s never been before.

Our written language, that is, not our spoken language. And this is a distinctive praxis, and I don’t feel fatalistic about that. I would hope that people would feel encouraged. If you want to make changes, you can. The alphabet’s yours. Yes, it’s been handed on to you by this long list of people, but they’re in the [00:28:00] past and you’re in the present.

You can grasp the alphabet. You can stand up for certain ways of spelling, certain ways of writing, indeed certain ways of speaking. You don’t have to give into this tendency to use one very contingent, by no means inevitable standard to bash yourself over the head with and say, “Well, I can’t spell,” or, “I’m useless at this.”

I would love it if people felt empowered by reflecting on how they are equal participants in this story. So that’s, that’s it. I’ve said my piece.

Smiti: One of my biggest takeaways from this conversation is just how dynamic the English alphabet was and still is. If you’d like to learn more about Danny’s work, you can check out his website, Substack, social media, and of course his book, Why Q Needs U.

You’ll find those links in the show notes, along with the link to a full transcript of this episode. And if you’re curious to dig deeper and learn a bit more about Danny’s writing process for this book, he shares [00:29:00] that and more in a Patreon exclusive video. Our Patreon is free to join and gives you access to all of our bonus content.

If you’d like to support the podcast monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too. Thanks so much for listening and cultivating your curiosity with us. We’ll see you soon.

Credits

Dr. Danny Bate: Guest

Noor Hanania: Theme Music Creator

Laura Riveiro: Podcast Cover Art Creator

Brooke Norton: Production Support

Smiti Nathan: Host, Video Editor

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