The Final Debate Over Z

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And does the alphabet end with Z or Z? We'll get into the min uscule and majuscule of the alphabet with Danny Bate, author of Why Q Needs You, on this episode of Words Unraveled. Welcome to another words unraveled. I'm Rob Watts from the YouTube channel Rob Words. And I'm Jess Seferis, author of etymology books, including useless etymology, and today we are here with Dr. Danny Bate, author of Why Q Needs You, A History of Our Letters and How We Use Them. Excellent Book. Hello, uh, I'm Danny Bates and I'm happy to be here. Thank you very much for having me . Hello every guest. I'm V and I'm delighted. But we really are delighted to to have you on because this this book is it's not just about the history of the alphabet, but it's about the history of the English language in its entirety. But let's just get sort of straight into it. You aim to tell the story of the English alphabet, the alphabet that we use for English. But the English alphabet, I mean how English is the English alphabet? Not very, would be my answer to that. In our beloved field of linguistics, we often have to unlearn as well as learn. And the thing that I encourage people to unlearn is that English equals writing. Of course, English is written, but it's also spoken. And there is a time when English isn't written down, when English hasn't met the alphabet yet. So English speech comes from one direction and one part of the world, and English uh English's use of the alphabet comes from another part of the world. A very long story going back millennia. And I think think it's helpful to of it in terms of like a big family tree of writing that's passed through many different kinds of spoken language, and English is just one little twig on one part of a branch of the overall tree. You mention in your book it it it address es it it's broken down by letters. So we've got chapter A, chapter B, chapter C, and we learn about each of those letters throughout. But throughout this, you're also charting how these letters got their shapes, you're also charting their significance as they develop through history. And you have a few accounts and examples of how different letters in English came to be shaped the way they are, which I really enjoy. Can you give us a couple of examples of that? So if you were writing the alphabet and starting off your ABCs uh when the alphabet is first probably launched about four thousand years ago, you wouldn't really write ABC, you would write Oxhead House Stick. Because to begin with , A, B, C and all of the letters that are part of the original gang, so many have come and gone, many have been altered, but nonetheless there's a core that goes back uh that go back to that moment of creation. To begin with, they look pretty different. They look like things. Because, at least in terms of their physical appearance, they are modeled on existing Egyptian hieroglyphs. I make the point that all of this does need to be caveated by saying all of this is based on a a tiny bit of you know collection of archaeological evidence. Uh a single new find could upset the story that I'd like to tell you today. But that's uh as for the moment for the moment I can say this much. I'd like to say that it's not quite true to say that the alphabet comes from hieroglyphs. It's kind of like an offshoot or a a new tree that sprouts in the shadow of Egyptian hieroglyphs, uh which are about a thousand years old by the time that our alphabet is invented. And as I mentioned, they look like things. So our letter A to begin with is an ox's head. And if you take capital letter A and you turn it upside down, it kind of a little bit still looks like that. You have the legs of A, which are actually the ox's horns, the point of A, which is originally its mouth. It's lost tremendous details, it's changed in so many ways, but there's a hint of that earliest alphabetical history in the letter A. I think the letter M is a fun one that you talked about as well, because the shape of the letter M looks a bit like what it used to look like and what it used to look like looks like what it meant. Yes, exactly. It's w ater. So it's originally an Egyptian hieroglyphic depiction of water, and if you wanted to write out the Egyptian spoken word for water, if you wanted to represent it in writing, you'd do sort of three wiggly wavy lines. They're meant to look like waves or uh let's say uh troubled water. And uh you take one of those lines, you shorten it, you trim off the edges, you make it simpler, and that's not a bad thing. That's just the alphabet becoming more used and more efficient in the process, eventually you will end up with a capital M. That's excellent. And you also mentioned what letter is it that became the Greek sigma and looks looked a bit like an M originally? Aaron Powell So that's S. So that's all to do with S. And it's a it's it's it's probably a bow. It's some sort of composite bow, but there are alternative theories that it's uh a certain part of female anatomy. I've read that theory. Uh I've also read the theory that it's uh it's a tooth. Which bit? Uh the guest, I shouldn't treat you like that. The upper bit. The upper bit of female anatomy that uh The problem is like the the the bow theory is maybe the strongest, but we're working with pretty complicated evidence. It's we're looking at these earliest examples of alphabetical writing, squinting sometimes at these marks and scratches on bits of pot, and you know, occasionally cliffs in Egypt and things like that, and saying this hieroglyph was probably the prototype for the letter, whatever it happens to be. And in the case of S to begin with, it's probably um it's probably a bow and then becomes a tooth. But it's all debated. People will know the alphabet as the Roman alphabet or the Latin alphabet. So we can pin it to we have d you know it doesn't What happens in between those two epochs. If I can stick with my metaphor of the family tree, Rome is a very significant branch, but nonetheless, it is not the ultimate root. That would be that moment of creation in probably Egypt, thed Mleid kingdom of ancient Egypt, and from that base, from the Nile Valley, and especially the Sin ai Peninsula, the alphabet seems to be spread in a sort of anti clockwise motion up the coast of the Mediterranean until you arrive in what is today Lebanon. And in Lebanon is this uh civilization, culture, for want of a better word, called the Phoenicians. They're awesome, if people haven't heard of them. And from the Phoenicians being super impressive, and this real nexus point in the family tree, because it's from the Phoenician kind of standard version of the alphabet, around about a thousand BC. You will get the Arabic script, the Hebrew script, but crucially for our purposes, the Greek sc ript. And in a westwards direction, the alphabet reaches Greece. Again, highly debated, but let's put it at something like 800 BC. I'm sympathetic to the idea that it was even earlier than that, but 800 is when we got our first sources, and it's the Greeks who we can be more sure of pass it on to Italy, and there you find the Romans. So it's it's making its way around the Mediterranean. But what's confusing here is we know that the Greek alphabet itself is different to the alphabet that we use . How does that happen? There's two big themes. One is that when the alphabet uh you know is is given as a gift, uh, you know, they say you should be aware of Greeks bearing gifts, but the Romans didn't in this case. They were very happy to uh to take on board the alphabet um uh via other peoples of Iron Age Italy. Um when that happens, actually back in Greece, as well as politically, but also alphabetically, Greece is far from united. And so there are different versions and sort of vague trends in how you're using the alphabet. And one version, particularly a Western version of the Greek alph abet is what understandably, or unsurprisingly, gets transported to Italy. That means that there are some differences already because the standard Greek alphabet that you'll learn in in Greece today or in your Greek lessons is actually based on Eastern version of the alphabet. So that's a couple of differences there. Secondly, then letters back in Greece can just drop out. So our Roman version of the alphabet includes the letters F and Q. They are there in the archaic Greek alphabet, but they're not there now, because the Greeks for very sensible uh phonetic or phonemic reasons don't need them. So they've uh fallen by the wayside. So that will mean some differences between the, let's say, niece and and uh auntie or whatever the relationship is. You're gonna see some differences between them. You are a fantastic writer. I I enjoy the the comedy that appears in this work as well. And uh you mentioned common sense a moment ago, and uh it in your chapter on Q, which is a fantastic chapter. It's also where the book gets its title. So uh appropriately. So you describe the letter Q as the English alphabet's greatest absurdity and insult to the effici to inf efficiency and common sense . And you point out that in uh old English words like queen and quick, they were um I quote very sensibly spelled with a C. Yeah you also said it was that most useless of Roman gifts. I don't know what was cued onto her . I suppose it's maybe it's kind of uh emblematic or um it's uh symptomatic of the fact that we we really don't think about the alphabet as much as the ancients did. And we we could I don't know where this is coming from. Very sort of impassive and neutral. And maybe this was me cutting free a bit. Aaron Powell We obviously do need to do something about it, I I think, because we've got three letters that make a ka sound. So and the question I put to you is the question that you put to everyone who picks up to your book, which is why Q needs you? Why does Q need you? It's a big question. And what's really nice is that Q thankfully comes later on in the alphabet, um, so that I have had time to set the scene. I don't need to throw all the necessary information at my dear reader. Q has been fairly useless in most, if not all, branches of the Alphabet's family tree for quite a while now. To begin with, it actually deserves to be included. It stands for a specific sound. It's actually a sound that's quite hard for me to replicate, but it's a kind of cut sound with added uh glottalization. It's uh what's known as the emphatic consonants or one of the emphatic consonants of ancient Semitic languages because all of the alphabet I should stretch would um say is coming from a context of Semitic speech um so related to Jess was trying to teach me this precise sound a couple of episodes ago when we were talking about Arabic. The ka ka ka ka ka sound. It has changed and it's gone different ways, but crucially in kind of the in that Greek branch, quite quickly. It stands for a kind of plain old k sound. There is a couple of really interesting bits of information that um that indicate that uh maybe the Greeks used it for a quite slightly different type of k sound, what's known as an allophone, but it's a flimsy argument. Basically, by the time we reach uh recognizable ancient Greek, it's a k now. And it continues with that sound into Italy, into the hands of the Romans. And the Romans are ruthless with the alphabet. They they really prune letters if they can't be assigned to one sound of Latin. However, great news for Q , they think of a kind of qu sound, what's known as a labio vela, lips and the velum at the back of your mouth, they think of that as a separate sound from q . So consequently, consequently, it can keep its distinct spelling. It can keep its own way of spelling. And there's indications that they were thinking about giving this sound to Q alone, which I think will be very sensible, but they don't take that step. And they just you use Q U or it kind of looks like a Q capital V and that stands for qua. K, by the way, is God . They basically purge that from Latin because they don't need it But it's doing something else as well, isn't it? But at the end of words when we have Q U E to make sort of an eek sound, like in technique, for example, it's not making a qua sound at all. So I I mean w how did that end up happening? Uh French. That's how that ends up happening. Uh you know it's the the old French saying technique way at some point. Was someone saying technique ? This is a French technique. I can't think of a better word for it. It's a French technique of spelling. And what you've got here is the qu sound, as I said, this labio villa sound, it merges in everyday Latin speech. It becomes a plain old k. And you see this in the descendants of Latin. So you'd have a word like I don't know um uh quis in Latin meaning who in French it's just ki. It's gone from qu to qu and I think I mention this uh in the book it's one of my favourite inscriptions which we have from the I think it's the fourth century is a guy confusing C and Q U because he's confusing the K sound with the qu sound because they are falling into one another. They're merging. He writes quad cod like cod and then corrects himself later on and spells it correctly, um, or at least conservatively. But the thing is, I will just mention that for many languages that continue to use QU in the Latin manner like French and Spanish, it's still useful. And there's a weird kind of trend where when speech changes, we might expect writing to lag behind and it often does, but often it can spell very convincingly whatever has occurred in speech, whatever's happened next as a kind of um strange sort of parallel innovation going on there. There is an aversion to K in the Romance languages, isn't there? I've n never really thought about it. But there is. And that's a hangover from literally the Romans having no truck with K. I enjoyed that you included Ben Franklin's suggestion that we get rid of Q and X entirely because you can do everything they can't they do in English with a K and an S. And Rob recently performed at the Bloomsbury Theatre a a performance about how to fix the English language, which he's also covered on his YouTube channel. You also suggested at least consol consolidating some of our k sounds. I do think that we should just give the k job to K Aaron Powell Talk to me about the way we deal with the H in like P H and T H and C H and why that happens in general. Absolutely. I will just say, Rob, that like I feel like you might be somewhat sympathetic to that view of English or that proposal, because it's not a million worlds away from German in that we're using C for something Yeah, so it it's something that uh may take off. I don't know. I I'm in favor of it, I'll just put it like that. The letter E allows us to spell more vowel sounds, like your kind of magic E the end of I don't know, a surname like bait. But credit is also due to H, which I think is the consonant workhorse. It allows us to spell more consonant sounds. Sounds that crucially weren't there in Latin. They don't have sounds like uh th and sh and t . These are either later innovations in the descendants of Latin or these are sounds in just other languages that have very little relationship to uh to Lat in. So what are you gonna do about it? Either you can embellish your letters with what we call diacritics or accents, like little marks above or below. So this is the preferred root of my local language which, is Czech , or you can combine letters into what we call digraphs and trigraphs, whether it's multiple letters standing for one sound. And H is at least in English, it's the combiner par excellence. This is actually not specific to English. It's really old. Um, I think in the Alphabets family tree it goes back at least as far as the Greeks. The Greeks are the first people to realize that our Greek language can be can be made to fit or the letters can be made to fit spoken Greek really well, but nonetheless there's a couple of maybe R like sounds, as in, you know, R not back not the vowel but the you know the r sound, um probably r for the Greeks . We need to combine it sometimes with an H to indicate a kind of voiceless, maybe breathier r sound. This then is carried on to the Romans. The Romans maybe pick up on this idea, so they're combining H with P and T and C to spell Greek words. That's why today we still spell words like I don't know, um photo in theater and orchestra. You see the phth ch that's indic indicative of a Greek origin. And after the Romans, this just explodes, like this really snowballs. In the H really does become the default combining letter. It's what you use to spell more consonant sounds. That's probably given a boost by the fact that the simple sound on its own, that h sound, that H stands for, is actually probably it's dropped. It's dropped from spoken Latin. Um, this happens in London English to this day, it's very typical of lots of dialects of English, happened in ancient Greek, uh, even before the Romans. It happens again for the Romans. This letter just clearly doesn't want to live, or the sound doesn't want to live, it keeps being dropped over and over again. And that means you've got to you have a letter going spare. And ever since H is uh it's the ultimate combiner. It's the workhorse of uh of the alphabet. Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual, even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show. Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this? Your first date? Oh no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Ah! Me to a human, him to a bird. Yeah, the bird looks out of your leg anyways. Get a quote at LibertyMutual.com or with your local agent. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. From Capitol Hill to Chesapeake Bay, Giant is where you feed your love for where you play, with flex rewards, and more that work online or in stores. To make saving worth savoring all year long. Giant, this is home . One thing that you mentioned about H that came as a complete surprise to me is that it's a descendant, I don't know if that's the right word to use for it, of the Russian E letter, that backwards capital N 'cause that's one of the fascinating things. Is you see this this letter is related to this letter in this alphabet. Blah blah blah blah blah. Help us get our heads around how a letter in the Russian alphabet that makes an E sound can end up being a letter in our alphabet that makes a ha sound. That's a fun one. That's a really fun one because you think come on. I mean firstly it looks like a backwards N, doesn't it come from an N? The Cyrillic script, which Russian is written in, goes back to Greek, as does the English script. So that's a kind of nexus point, even though, as I hope I got across at the outset, it's passing through very different spoken languages. The writing, the kind of strands of writing do meet up somewhere else in the family tree and somewhere else in Europe, and Greek is their common departure point. The Greeks, specifically one group of Greeks, uh people we call the Ioni ans, they lose the h sound. So this means that the letter heta , which is again one of the earliest members of the gang, it's right right there in the Phoenician alphabet and beyond, it's it's going spare. They don't get rid of it. They think, well, we actually have this really common e vowel. Well, why don't we give it its own letter? And so heta becomes et her. It looks like an H in Greek to this day. So I'm almost there. Bear with me. That's how you kind of get from the English bit to the Greek bit in that, you know, you have English, it looks like H and it is H to begin with, and then it becomes a vowel letter. But then in Greek, it's undergone this incredible change in vowels called um et icism or ioti cism, where all of these vowels of spoken Greek are merging in pronunciation. And so we go from eta to ether and then from ether to eta. It's now standing for an E sound. And from this, with this value, this particular sound, it the letter leaves the Greek orbit and will become Cyrillic. So there you go. We got there in the end. While we're sort of floating around H's as well, you also revealed something that I hadn't thought about before, and that's that we we think we we're using just one type of huh sound, but then you pointed out that the way we say house and the way we say human, we're actually doing something completely different with our mouths to produce those two H's. Yes, I love that. I I I really I I'm so pleased that you mentioned this. Um and I have got a little bit of backlash from this. Um, what's happened is that H is originally it's in your larynx, it's a kind of it's it's barely a consonant, it's a kind of breathy sound. Because in English we have lots of words that are immediately followed by what's known as a yod sound, like a very quick like a y sound, and then another vowel . It brings this this consonant out of the throat and into the palate of the mouth where where y is produced. If you say yo yo, you can you can feel it with your tongue towards the roof of your mouth. So we go, it would have been pronounced surely in let's say early modern English, it would have been hum an, but we have a a merger, a fusion of the H and the invisible Y sound, let's say the the h and the Y into a kind of h which is a palatal sound. So human, humidity , humility, things like that. For me, these are all palatal sounds. Just as you you, Rob, would speak every day in a word like uh ich in German. It's again a palatal sound that with it in German has been brought forward in the mouth. Um, perfectly natural change, uh, just totally unreflected in our spelling. That speaks to yod dropping, doesn't it? Yeah. Yod dropping is uh uh a phenomenon that maybe separates, I don't know, perhaps Danny and I from how Jess pronounces some words. For example, we would say news and Jess, would you say news? News, yeah. Would you say news news. News. News. Yod dro pping that to that news. Yod dropping absolutely varies um across English. Um my home region, which is East Anglia in the UK, actually takes yod dropping to an extreme. So actually it really is. It's Homan. You are a Human if you come from Norfolk. Yeah, that so that so the big the most famous arguably company from uh Norfolk is Bernard Matthews, the turkey farmer. And what did his slogan used to be? Bootiful. Bootiful. Yep. There you go. Extreme which Jess, you wouldn't say bootiful. It's beautiful, right? No, it's beautiful. Exactly. Um but this this does remind me too i in the other direction, the H is often dropped in some American dialects. You'll hear human or famously at the moment huge yes instead of huge. Before like E's and things, we tend to not um not include that that yawn sound. Another revelation for me, Danny, right at the top of the book, was that A started out as a consonant? It did. It it actually did. Um and it's a consonant that is uh super common in spoken English today, and yet has no letter. It's not right to say it's gone full circle, but we have ended up in a strange position where we have A and it doesn't represent the sound that maybe it it really could and we could benefit from. A to begin with starts with a glottal stop. It's this uh kind of a brief clos ure of your uh laryngeal uh folds in your mouth. It's uh it's super common. Glottal stop. Glottal stop, right? But I mean I just you said in glottal stop there. I just then immediately said it in right. I'm not pronouncing as right it's right, you know it's very, very common in English. In fact, most words in English that start with a vowel sound in isolation may well actually start with a glottal stop, you know, that I will say things like , Oh, I'm going to buy apples. There is a subtle glottal stop there. Um string it together, I'm going to buy apples, it's not there, but it may be there in isolation. The Semitic speech of the alphabet's inventors 4,000 years ago has a series of consonants and they assign each one to a particular hieroglyph based on their word for that hieroglyph and what conson ant that word starts with. So if you have a a cow, a cow starts with an glottal stop, it's alp in their language, and now a picture of a cow stands for a glottal stop. I mentioned consonants there . To begin with, the alphabet is purely consonantal. I never know where to put the stress in that word. It's purely consonants to begin with. Because consonantal onantal. I don't I don't really know. Um but uh to begin with, uh the it's all about consonants, as it still kind of is, with other members of the family tree which have continued to write down Semitic langu ages. So Hebrew and Arabic, for example, consonants are very much the basis. There are letters for um that can serve vowel sounds. You can also add additional marks for uh vowels as well, but consonants are really the basis and have continued to be since the earliest days of the alphabet. The Semitic language or dialects at this really early point in time have very few vowels, very few vowel sounds. So when you're writing, you can just in you can like infer what they are. You know, because you speak the language, you know what the vowels are going to be in the written words, and you say, aha, I recognize that this is you know this particular word. Secondly, people who know or speak Semitic languages will know and maybe love this. It's a great uh feature of the Semitic language uh family as a whole. Consonants are the bit that tell you the meaning of a word. The rasta. Yeah, right? So you have your sort of what's called the root and template structure. You have your tri-radical roots, where you have a series of three consonants. These in the abstract refer to something or some concept or feature or activity. They're the lexical bit , and you slot vowel sounds in between them to maybe express features of grammar or something like that. You get your meaning of the word from what it's uh what the consonants happen to be. So what I'm getting at here is that consonants are the stars of the show. They have many of them in relation to vowels, and they also are what you need when you're going to be writing down the language so that people know what you're writing about. And if this sounds confusing, if I may share something which I I'm quite proud of, I'm allowed one stroke of brilliance per day as a writer, and everything else is just awful. There is a super common word that by accident, by total accent, kind of works a little bit like a Semitic three consonant root in that you change the vowels in between them to change the grammar. It's not universal, so not all English accents have this. I believe Canadian English , for example, tends not to. I mean I'll put you out of your misery. It's not particularly obvious, but it works in my English at least. Any guesses? No. Uh no . No. I was thinking words that are subject to like initial stress derivation, like permit and permit. This is something that works in sort of southern English. Southern British English is that what we're talking about. I was trying to narrow it down. Does it work in my slightly northern equivalent of it? I believe so. Please put us out of our misery. Uh woman. Oh Yeah. Go on. Woman women in my English. So the consonants stay the same and there are three of them. The vowels in my English change between singular and plural. I have also noticed that people on the internet are are larg ely very poor at s at selecting the correct plural of or plural or singular of that word. It's mixed up frequently. I see women plural presented as woman singular very frequently, which is odd and I that has to be part of the reasoning behind that. I think what you are referring to there is a kind of merger in the singular and plural. So I have one friend who's a a uh native uh I mean he's a native English speaker from um British Columbia and for him the singular and plural sound exactly the same. It's just woman. Really? So it's it's it's a mess. It's English. That's not very helpful, is it? It's not very helpful. And that O sometimes makes like an I sound almost too, like women. This reminded me of Danny's recent discussion online about the word English and why it's pr why it's spelled with an E instead of say an I. I think it's the only example of an ENG making an ing sound. Except for what is it? Is it penguin? Is also one too? No, but penguin, I'm not having penguin. You're not having penguin, penguin, need to grow up. That's how I say it. There there's your sound bite right there. There's your soundbite . I I've actually just been researching the origin of the word the word penguin. There's just no excuse for it being penguin whatsoever. I mean if indeed it comes from the Welsh penguin, meaning whitehead. I mean there's just I have to make myself say it penguin. Like that's that doesn't feel right. Everything about that word is ludicrous. It doesn't look like an English word. And that's why people have say it in so many different ways. I mean uh have you ever seen there's a clip of um Benedict Cumberbatch and it's from a BBC nature documentary where he's he's calling them ping wings, he's calling them pinwangs. He's having absolute shock over the word. Because it looks so foreign and it doesn't it doesn't fit with the rules. All right, okay, fine. Penguin as well. Talk about English and and English. Yeah, or En Englglishish. . Which again, like if you happen to be uh I don't know, a citizen of Germany or Austria, English is absolutely fine. It's just your name for the language. Uh so it it's perfectly possible there's nothing about this uh unds that the human mouth can't produce. I'm gonna have to exclude penguin uh on the grounds that if you pronounce penguin as penguin, you absolutely can, but that's part of a much broader change. That's the pin pen merger which is going on in North America. So pin and pen, that sort of thing. Um it might happen in New Zealand. All right. And I'm not telling the entirety of New Zealand that they need to grow up. Yeah. People do say pin when they mean pen in some dialects here, yeah. I was uh this is complete aside, but I was in um a lecture uh or a a a talk once when somebody was uh basically showing how you can really with great accuracy map vowel positions in the mouth, right? Where you're producing the vowel, what what height your tongue is. And they had this data from six successive generations of New Zealand speakers with the specific vowel. With future generations, it's it's on the move, so it'll become something new. And it was uh it was weird. It was like seeing a vowel change being born on the graph in front of us. So um maybe this will not become sort of you know the characteristic New Zealand uh English forever. I d I don't know. But nonetheless, in North America we have the pin pen merger. And because of that, because this huge mass of words which where the i and the e vowel are becoming the same before nasals , um you have things like penguin. English, the word English very appropriately is just this total outlier. It's always been this outlier , especially in accents that don't have the pin-pen merger like mine and like yours, Rob, where English it starts with an i . And this is because there was a sort of precursor to the pin pen merger in late middle English, early modern English, where the eh vowel is being raised in the same environment before a nasal. It's being raised up to become i. It's going from e to ear when it comes before a nasal sound. So a word like uh uh linga is originally lenger . That's so there's things like that are going on, and we can see that all of the words that are affected have their spelling updated, going being written from with an E to an I, except for one. English . And it's really, really hard to explain. And in my little piece, I I basically speculated what on earth could be the reasons. It's not linguistic reasons. It it's it's sentimentality. We don't like the look of English with an I. Um and consequently English with an E is is really old. It all goes all the way back to the old English period. It's been spelt this way for so long. And we've never made that leap. People have. We absolutely have examples of people spelling English with an I, but standard English has settled on this unique piece of uh conservativism uh for the reasons of sentimentality. So uh before we go, I wanted to talk about your i in your book you'd address how lowercase or minuscule letters came to be as opposed to majuscule letters. And I laughed out loud at the passage that described all capital Roman writing as looking like angry shouting. Yeah, it always looks peculiar embedded in a page of normal English text, doesn't it? So so ha what is the relationship between lowercase minuscule letters and majuscule the the capitals? Yeah, so it it's like a relationship of offspring. Um in the the capital letters are the older ones, right? They're the ones uh babies. Yeah, they're kind of yeah, so the lowercase are the babies. The lowercase letters or minuscule letters emerge over the course of the Roman Empire from the Majuscule ones. As people in the Roman Empire are becoming ever more literate and they're writing on all sorts of materials, they're writing private documents, letters to friends many of which I should say actually come from the UK, the surviving ones that we have, and that it's amazing. And this kind of everyday cursive develops. This simplifies the letters, it makes them quicker and easier to write. And the process of cursivization for some is very straightforward, like a capital S, it's it's so curvy already it just can remain a very curvy letter. Um letter C, for example, likewise just gets shrunk a bit. But others through this process may end up being reduced in complexity. So I think that's certainly true of what would it be? Something like um I don't know., Q R is a really weird. R is a good one. Poor R gets dismembered. It really does. It really does. And dismembered is actually the perfect word because R is a head originally. It's a kind of pictographic or hieroglyphic head. Oh so decapitated. Decapitated, yes. And we can really see this in the centuries of the Roman Empire, so that's the first few centuries AD . You can see people starting to sort of unravel. Unravel. It goes from being. I said the thing. I said the thing, you know. Um it is unraveled as a letter because um b because you we see it go from let's say the the stalk of R and that sort of uh a bump and then a leg sticking out from it. And the bump and leg just come to rest on top of the stalk, if that makes sense. It's sort of backwards, like a that shape, and then a stalk, and then a that it's sort of a bit looser and looser until it's really just a no more than just a kind of bended stalk. And that's a lowercase R, that's where we get it from. And it suffers really badly. Um and others like A, A finds one of the legs of capital A looped back until you create something that looks like a lowercase A and D gets reversed. You know, the bulge of a capital D points in a different direction to the bulge of a lowercase d because basically the bulge of the lowercase d, the round bit, was the stalk, the stem originally, and it's been curved. So it's all a process of Roman cursivization. And let's say, to put a rough date on it. L'ets say by the year 400 , the lowercase letters are in place. And from this point onwards, the the uppercase letters will won't go anywhere, but a kind of rule book for when to use each one will gradually emerge and we end' upll with uh upper and lower case? We started by talking about A right up top. So let's finish by talking about Z . Put this one to bed for us. Is it Z or is it Z ? Well, I defer in all things to my personal hero uh Dr. Samuel Johnson, who says that it's Izzart . It's n ice to do like Izzard. Izzard, Izzard. Maybe maybe the great doctor can provide uh an end, uh, you know, a resolution, an armistice for this uh particular conflict. Um it it's both are correct. Both are correct and both are not just correct, but back ed up by good working principles. Zo Z is harmonious with it rhymes with other letters of the alphabet, and Z honours etymology and history in that the letter name of the letter Z comes from Zeta in ancient Greek, and it's passes through French, and you end up with Z at the end of the alphabet. It's put there by the Romans having originally got rid of the letter, they then reluctantly bring it back to spell Greek words. And the Izard that Dr. Johnson refers to, which has completely fallen out of fashion, is probably a kind of um confusion of French Ez so ending the French alphabet as X z at the very end, and this becomes Izard. Um, I just say that like our kind of tribalism, uh, you know, we we we we stake our our our allegiance in the sand and we say I'm team Z, I'm Team Z. It's so modern'.s It so recent. And it it it's indicative of the letter's kind of marginal status slowly being put to use. I mean, Shakespeare in one of his plays, he calls it a useless letter. Because it's really it's not and so there's a little bit of you know variation about it and I can find you British writers calling it Z, I can find you American writers calling it uh Z. Uh and I think it will be resolved someday. I just I won't make any firm predictions how this conflict will be resolved. I do wonder if the song won't settle it, because there is something wrong with going T U V W X Y and Z . Izzard doesn't solve that problem either. You had to go with Z for your show so it would work, right? I did indeed, yeah. I did sing that song and and I did convert to a Z. It it's it's tough, but we can do it. And like I don't say Gen Z . I don't say S Gen Z. So it's little this is how it creeps in and uh And also when I say Jay Z um referring to Jess Zafaris uh then I always say Jay Z. Can I um can I can I make um a point just, a slight point