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Speaker 1: Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,

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Speaker 1: fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for

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Speaker 1: tuning in. This is the second part of our episode

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Speaker 1: on the weird weird story of how the modern English

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Speaker 1: alphabet became a thing. So on a personal message, I

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Speaker 1: owe you and sometimes why our.

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Speaker 2: You owe me? We owe each other the world.

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Speaker 1: Yes, it's true, and that's our super producer, mister Max Williams.

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Speaker 1: That's the main man, our pal, mister Noel Brown. Helloh,

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Speaker 1: they called me ben Bollen in many parts of the world.

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Speaker 1: And no h for anybody who is tuning in. Now,

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Speaker 1: what did we learn in our previous exploration of the

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Speaker 1: English alphabet?

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Speaker 2: Oh? Boy, where to even start? We learned that Chaucer

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Speaker 2: was a saucy boy. He liked butts and talking funny.

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Speaker 2: And we learned that Max has a real talent for

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Speaker 2: voice acting. Those are my two major takeaways.

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Speaker 1: M Yeah, and those are great things to take away

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Speaker 1: from the first episode and to take with us in

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Speaker 1: the second episode. Fellow Ridiculous Historians, Please, please please, if

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Speaker 1: you have not listened to part one of How the

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Speaker 1: English Alphabet Became a thing, We're gonna pause and give

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Speaker 1: you a second to catch up before we dive into

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Speaker 1: modern English. We're gonna put some mustard on this one.

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Speaker 2: Ooh yeah, indeed, hopefully spicy brown. It's my favorite kind

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Speaker 2: of mustard.

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Speaker 1: You know.

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Speaker 3: And if you want to listen to the other one

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Speaker 3: after the fact, that's cool too, because we start kind

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Speaker 3: of right on modern English to Ben's point, which is

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Speaker 3: a spelling system that developed from around thirteen hundred and

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Speaker 3: fifty the year onwards.

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Speaker 2: Yes, right, see. Indeed, when after three centuries of the

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Speaker 2: Norman French being in charge, English gradually became the official

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Speaker 2: language of the land that is England.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it became the official language again, right again.

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Speaker 2: But it was like when New.

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Speaker 1: Coke got rolled out, as a Coca Cola classic got

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Speaker 1: rolled out.

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Speaker 2: It's not the same thing.

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Speaker 1: The new English language is quite different from everything that

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Speaker 1: happened before about ten sixty six CE, and it incorporated

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Speaker 1: a lot of words from French origin. Later we will

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Speaker 1: call this phenomenon loan words. So, for instance, in this situation,

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Speaker 1: we see French origin words shout out to the Normans,

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Speaker 1: things like battle, beef, button, et cetera. You also see

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Speaker 1: it in modern English with things.

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Speaker 2: Like boondocks exactly, and I think we already know all

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Speaker 2: ridiculous historians included that the printing press was kind of

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Speaker 2: a big deal. I'll tell you what I didn't fully know,

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Speaker 2: or if I did, I maybe only partially knew and

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Speaker 2: then forgot how the printing press not only was a

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Speaker 2: big deal in the proliferation of language and of modern English,

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Speaker 2: but also like the words themselves, because some people got

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Speaker 2: paid by the length of words, and that kind of

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Speaker 2: stuck around. I thought that was really cool. We'll get

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Speaker 2: to that in the sense. William Kaxton is who we're

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Speaker 2: talking about today. Of course, the printing press was invented

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Speaker 2: by Johann Gutenberg in fourteen forty eight, but in Great Britain,

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Speaker 2: William Kaxton was responsible for bringing this technology around in

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Speaker 2: the mid fifteenth century. Oh yeah, but.

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Speaker 1: He brought it over the Channel. It was not a

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Speaker 1: clean process. They found the technology, they did not yet

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Speaker 1: have the uniformity or consistency of language. So when our

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Speaker 1: buddy Willie brings the concept or the technology of the

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Speaker 1: printing press to London, it's around fourteen seventy six, so

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Speaker 1: not too many decades after Gutenberg invents the printing press. Now,

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Speaker 1: our buddy Willy at this point is in a bit

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Speaker 1: of a pickle. He's been living in what we call

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Speaker 1: the continent continental Europe for more than thirty years. As

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Speaker 1: a result, he does not have an up to the

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Speaker 1: present day grasp of the English spelling system as they

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Speaker 1: would do it over the Channel. And further, he brings

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Speaker 1: a bunch of his assistants from Belgium. Those guys also

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Speaker 1: have no clue. They kind of freestyle what they think

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Speaker 1: words should sound like.

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Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean, let's not forget. Language is its own

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Speaker 2: form of technology in a way, and it sometimes requires

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Speaker 2: a little bit of on the fly adjustments to make

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Speaker 2: it work. So let's add to that another little hiccup.

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Speaker 2: As printing developed and then the business of printing sprang up,

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Speaker 2: people started to develop a rather you know, companies organizations

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Speaker 2: started to develop their own signature preferences, a term that

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Speaker 2: sticks around today known as house styles, which you might

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Speaker 2: hear use for different magazines, for example, or different ad agencies.

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Speaker 2: They might have a house style. Then you can probably

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Speaker 2: shed a little bit more like on specifically what that means.

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Speaker 2: But my understanding is that has to do with maybe

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Speaker 2: the use of an Oxford Comma, for example, or like

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Speaker 2: how certain punctuations are used in the house style of

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Speaker 2: say Vanity Fair versus People Magazine.

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Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it's like is this going to be a

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Speaker 1: U or a V? Right, because we're still in that

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Speaker 1: era of development. Also, I would like to point out

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Speaker 1: they said house styles instead of signature styles, because no

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Speaker 1: one could agree on how best do you spell the

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Speaker 1: word signature.

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Speaker 2: And the houses in question are, of course, these printing houses.

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Speaker 2: These are literally various shops, you know, like and so

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Speaker 2: the term house styles gets taken and kind of use

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Speaker 2: for a broader sense, you know of like the signature

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Speaker 2: style of a different publication or like I said, an

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Speaker 2: advertising company to refer to. It can also refer to graphics,

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Speaker 2: or it can refer to color palettes or various different

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Speaker 2: things like that, house styleographies two hundred percent, how to

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Speaker 2: make citations, how to format footnote and things like that. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, and that gets in the weeds super easily. What

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Speaker 1: you need to know, folks, is the idea of generating

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Speaker 1: what we call modern English. While it is launched by

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Speaker 1: the amazing innovation of the printing press, it is complicated

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Speaker 1: by short term economic interests of the times. As you

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Speaker 1: noted NOL these type setters at these various different non unified,

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Speaker 1: not really a union at this point. These type setters

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Speaker 1: are all trying to make their own proprietary thing. And

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Speaker 1: the blokes who put the blocks in order to print

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Speaker 1: your local broadsheets, they got paid per line, so they

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Speaker 1: had a hard economic interest in making words longer because

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Speaker 1: it meant they made more money when they did.

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Speaker 2: So. I just had no idea about this detail, and

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Speaker 2: I think it's so fascinating. How areary a lot of

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Speaker 2: the evolution of language tends to be. It's like holdovers

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Speaker 2: from people just making decisions that were relevant at the

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Speaker 2: time for very specific and often selfish reasons, but just

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Speaker 2: they just kind of stick around, like silent letters and

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Speaker 2: things like that that maybe were left over from old English.

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Speaker 2: They were just say, you know, what it benefits us

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Speaker 2: to have that silent h or what have you, you know,

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Speaker 2: in the middle of the word, so let's just leave it.

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Speaker 2: They were paid, like you said, by the line, that

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Speaker 2: kind of modern equivalent. I guess you might think about

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Speaker 2: it sort of the opposite, where if you're putting a

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Speaker 2: personals ad or an advertisement in a newspaper, you pay

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Speaker 2: by the word exactly, so you know, it behooves you

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Speaker 2: in that situation to err on the side of brevity,

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Speaker 2: being the soul of wit and all of that. So

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Speaker 2: it really is a pickle, Like you said, Ben, Yeah, it's.

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Speaker 1: A real bag of badger's there because we have to

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Speaker 1: exercise empathy. Imagine you're a type setter back in the

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Speaker 1: day and you say, oh, hey, most other print houses

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Speaker 1: are spelling this word something like through. For instance, they're

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Speaker 1: spelling it t h R e w A. What if

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Speaker 1: I spell it t h r o U g H

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Speaker 1: and get a little vigoroush. Right, Who am I to

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Speaker 1: argue with a greater good? It's a real bag of badgers.

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Speaker 1: The biggest changes in English spelling consistency. They occurred kind

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Speaker 1: of around the sixteenth century as well, because a guy

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Speaker 1: named William Tyndale translated the New Testament in fifteen thirty nine,

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Speaker 1: a guy named Henry the Eighth. Yes, that King Henry,

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Speaker 1: he said, very well, print thy Bibles in English in England.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, a bit of a best seller. Turned out that

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Speaker 2: the old New Testament, I mean, it's no Harry Potter. Well,

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Speaker 2: you know, it was sort of the Harry Potter of

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Speaker 2: its day. So that that led to numerous editions of

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Speaker 2: these Bibles. And it wasn't until I think we this

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Speaker 2: is pre King James, right, this is when, oh man,

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Speaker 2: I just mean in terms of standardization like this led

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Speaker 2: to a lot of different variations in print houses because

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Speaker 2: the King Henry basically just you know, lifted whatever moratorium

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Speaker 2: might have been on printing the sacred Word of God,

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Speaker 2: and that led to folks having their own house styles,

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Speaker 2: even for something as massive as the Bible.

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Speaker 1: One hundred percent. Dude, the King James translation, it's commissioned

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Speaker 1: in sixteen oh four, it doesn't get printed until sixteen eleven.

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Speaker 1: So before King James, our buddy Henry is saying, look,

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Speaker 1: we need an English Bible in England because, as you said,

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Speaker 1: the differing versions or attempts to translate or commune unicate

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Speaker 1: the Christian Bible, they were all printed outside of England

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Speaker 1: by people who, and I'm not gonna be rude about this,

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Speaker 1: they spoke little to no English themselves.

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Speaker 2: You know. It reminds me of there's this band that

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Speaker 2: I love, I think you're familiar with, to Ben King

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Speaker 2: Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. They do this really cool

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Speaker 2: thing where all of their records, of which they have

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Speaker 2: a gazillion. They make the masters available to anybody who

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Speaker 2: wants to make a version of it. So, like, you know,

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Speaker 2: if you are a small record printing company like LPs

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Speaker 2: UH and you want to design your own version of

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Speaker 2: a King Gizzard record, that is totally cool, which leads

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Speaker 2: to this proliferation. Likely nigh on impossible to track down

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Speaker 2: every version of their records, which is really really cool.

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Speaker 2: But obviously the records remains the same. In this case,

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Speaker 2: the actual contents were being styled on. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's similar to while we're praising contemporaries, it's similar

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Speaker 1: to how the amazing author Stephen King has what he

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Speaker 1: calls dollar babies. And if you are hearing this you're

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Speaker 1: an up and coming filmmaker, this is true. This is

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Speaker 1: still a real thing you can do. You can write

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Speaker 1: to Stephen King, or you know, more realistically, you can

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Speaker 1: write to his estate and you can say, I'd like

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Speaker 1: to adapt one of your stories for film, one of

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Speaker 1: your short stories. They will charge you one US dollar

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Speaker 1: because like King Gizzard and or The Lizard Wizard, the

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Speaker 1: guy just wants the story to be out there, and

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Speaker 1: that's what people are doing with this concept of the Bible,

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Speaker 1: the story of God and Jesus Christ. A lot of

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Speaker 1: the printers who are making copies translations of the Bible,

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Speaker 1: they are Dutch, and so being Dutch, they routinely change

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Speaker 1: the spelling of a word to match what makes sense

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Speaker 1: to them as Dutch speakers. And this is why we're

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Speaker 1: gonna put you on the game right here, ridiculous historians.

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Speaker 1: This is why you have so many h's going after

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Speaker 1: G in English. It's not because of English. It's because

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Speaker 1: of those Dutch folks who printed the Bibles. Like you,

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Speaker 1: you wouldn't say no, you wouldn't say the H after

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Speaker 1: ghosts or after the G and ghosts we do. I

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Speaker 1: do have to admit we both have a lot of

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Speaker 1: fun saying the H in whip.

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Speaker 2: Hip or how would you even say the agent ghost

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Speaker 2: the host that just becomes another word entirely aghast a

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Speaker 2: hurricane man. Actually I don't They're kind of gross. But

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Speaker 2: it's funny though, because all these silent letters. It's something

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Speaker 2: that I've always scratched my head about because it does

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Speaker 2: make learning English difficults. You know, people always say that

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Speaker 2: English is a difficult language to learn to speak, let alone,

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Speaker 2: right and it's because of a lot of these weird spellings.

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Speaker 2: And obviously, of course there are weird conjugations and things

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Speaker 2: like that that are not present in other languages. But

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Speaker 2: I think that kind of game of telephone, that is

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Speaker 2: the English language is largely what leads to that difficulty

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Speaker 2: for maybe new speakers to fully wrap their heads around it,

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Speaker 2: because sometimes we can't even wrap our heads around and

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Speaker 2: we've been speaking since we were little children.

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Speaker 1: I'm still learning it. I wouldn't consider myself a native

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Speaker 1: speaking right.

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Speaker 4: So back in the day, Europe overall, especially are good

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Speaker 4: friends in England, they got all these weird spellings and

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Speaker 4: they decided to let it ride.

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Speaker 2: They were like, we're.

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Speaker 1: Cool, what's going on with how there's sometimes a V

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Speaker 1: and sometimes a you. It wasn't until the mid sixteenth

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Speaker 1: century that V and you became different distinct letters. You

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Speaker 1: became the vowel, V became the consonant. And it reminds

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Speaker 1: me of our earlier exploration this week, where remember how

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Speaker 1: we saw that the first alphabet ish thing only at consonants.

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Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, made it very gutturaled, and we talked about

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Speaker 2: that as well, that those vowels is really what makes

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Speaker 2: the kind of more flowing quality to language. So in

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Speaker 2: sixteen oh four Robert Quadry published the first English Dictionary,

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Speaker 2: and what's a dictionary if not an attempt to start

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Speaker 2: to codify some of this stuff by placing it all

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Speaker 2: in a single tome. This was called the table Alphabetical,

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Speaker 2: and around this time Jay was added to create the

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Speaker 2: modern English alphabet more or less that we know today

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Speaker 2: more I think, right? Is it pretty much the exact one?

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Speaker 2: It's closer and closer, broke. Yeah, we're getting there.

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Speaker 1: We're getting We're edging toward the letters we know and love.

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Speaker 1: And we see each letter has its own origin, story,

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Speaker 1: its own providence and transformation over time. And this is true, folks.

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Speaker 1: These individual symbols would change position, they would flip around.

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Speaker 1: In some cases they got more flourishes, in other cases

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Speaker 1: they lost flourishes. I propose that we just run down

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Speaker 1: the list for funsies, you know, just to see how

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Speaker 1: ridiculous this is, and perhaps most importantly, to recognize that

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Speaker 1: no matter how static a given alphabet may appear to

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Speaker 1: be in your current time, they can always change.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, why don't mean to start at the beginning, huh?

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Speaker 2: With the old letter A I feel like we're on's street.

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Speaker 2: The original shape of the letter A was actually inverted,

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Speaker 2: so it looked kind of like the head of an

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Speaker 2: animal with horns and antlers. If you think about it, it

261
00:17:08,160 --> 00:17:10,720
Speaker 2: kind of looks something like a deer or a bull

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Speaker 2: even right. It was kind of fitting because in ancient

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Speaker 2: Semitic back to episode one, of course, the kind of

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Speaker 2: founders of the proto alphabet, the letter translated to ox.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, logograms, right, or idiograms. In some other parts of

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Speaker 1: the world. You see a drawing of an ox, of course,

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Speaker 1: it means ox, and then they flip it upside down

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Speaker 1: and now it's the letter A. If we go to B,

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Speaker 1: the letter B is fascinating because it's borrowed from the

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Speaker 1: pre existing Egyptian hieroglyphics, again logograms, and the letter was

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Speaker 1: originally resting on what we call its belly. Not to

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Speaker 1: anthropomorphize too much, but in its original shape, it looked

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Speaker 1: like a kid's draw of a house and it had

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Speaker 1: a door, and it had a roof, and it had

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Speaker 1: a room and kid, you know, folks, about four thousand

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Speaker 1: years ago, that symbol did not represent the sound be.

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Speaker 1: It represented the idea of shelter. It was rain of

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Speaker 1: a house.

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Speaker 2: Well, that's really neat, Ben, because we've talked about this

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Speaker 2: idea of hobo code hieroglyphs that traveling folks might use,

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Speaker 2: you know, to designate certain features of towns, and you know,

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Speaker 2: like routes and things like that, and a lot of

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00:18:34,240 --> 00:18:36,719
Speaker 2: those do represent do look kind of like modern day

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Speaker 2: hieroglyphics orm you know, relatively modern speaking. But there's one

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Speaker 2: in particular that I really dig that represents safe, uh, safe,

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Speaker 2: safe haven. And it is kind of a lot like

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Speaker 2: a sort of stylized B, sometimes with little eyes in

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Speaker 2: the corners. So it's really neat the way this stuff

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00:18:52,359 --> 00:18:56,399
Speaker 2: kind of proliferates and changes and gets repurposed, you know,

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Speaker 2: in various ways over time. So next up, obviously, next

291
00:18:59,600 --> 00:19:01,399
Speaker 2: thing is next we should go to the letter C.

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Speaker 2: The letter came from the Phoenicians once again, and it

293
00:19:05,680 --> 00:19:08,520
Speaker 2: was shaped a lot like a boomerang or something, you know,

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Speaker 2: like some sort of projectile. They had no idea what boomerang,

295
00:19:11,640 --> 00:19:13,800
Speaker 2: they certainly didn't, but it was like, you know, a

296
00:19:13,800 --> 00:19:16,439
Speaker 2: half moon, let's call it as well. They call it

297
00:19:16,480 --> 00:19:19,480
Speaker 2: like a hunting stick. There you go. The Greeks called

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Speaker 2: it Gamma, and flipped it to the direction that it's

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00:19:21,600 --> 00:19:24,560
Speaker 2: written today, with the Italians giving it a bit more

300
00:19:24,600 --> 00:19:26,400
Speaker 2: of that half moon crescent shape.

301
00:19:26,520 --> 00:19:29,800
Speaker 1: They curved it, they took out the they took out

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00:19:29,840 --> 00:19:32,800
Speaker 1: the point there, and this is where we get to D.

303
00:19:33,800 --> 00:19:37,640
Speaker 1: Dallett is the name given to the letter D by

304
00:19:37,720 --> 00:19:43,080
Speaker 1: the Phoenicians round about eight hundred BCE. It looked like

305
00:19:43,640 --> 00:19:47,600
Speaker 1: at first a rough triangle, and where you see the

306
00:19:47,680 --> 00:19:51,160
Speaker 1: curve shape in a written letter D in modern English,

307
00:19:51,560 --> 00:19:54,880
Speaker 1: what you need to imagine is it's flipped and it's

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Speaker 1: a point y D facing left. The original meaning of

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00:19:59,880 --> 00:20:05,120
Speaker 1: that that letter was door, so you would open the door.

310
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Speaker 1: And then the Greeks adopted, again appropriated this alphabet, and

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00:20:10,480 --> 00:20:14,479
Speaker 1: they said, let's call it delta, and then they flipped it.

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Speaker 1: And then the Romans are the ones who said, he,

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Speaker 1: let's smooth out this point a little bit.

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Speaker 2: Sure with the hands. They're doing the hand the whole time.

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00:20:25,119 --> 00:20:27,440
Speaker 2: You know the symbol I mentioned a minute ago, the

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00:20:28,240 --> 00:20:33,919
Speaker 2: hobocode for safe harbor. It also looks like a B

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00:20:34,400 --> 00:20:36,960
Speaker 2: or a V or kind of an A where the

318
00:20:37,080 --> 00:20:39,560
Speaker 2: curves are removed and everything is just like a straight

319
00:20:39,680 --> 00:20:43,720
Speaker 2: kind of triangular shape with much more hard edges. So

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Speaker 2: moving past D, we are now of course onto E.

321
00:20:48,280 --> 00:20:50,919
Speaker 2: About thirty eight hundred years ago, the letter E was

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Speaker 2: pronounced more like an H sound, and that was again

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Speaker 2: in the Semitic language. It looked a lot like a

324
00:20:57,280 --> 00:21:00,199
Speaker 2: stick figure of a human with two arms. You can

325
00:21:00,240 --> 00:21:02,600
Speaker 2: kind of still see in the modern day equivalent for

326
00:21:02,640 --> 00:21:05,480
Speaker 2: some reason just had one leg, just the one, the one.

327
00:21:05,600 --> 00:21:08,320
Speaker 2: And in seven hundred BCE, the Greeks, once again there

328
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Speaker 2: are fans of the old flippity doo. They did just that,

329
00:21:11,119 --> 00:21:13,800
Speaker 2: and they change the pronunciation as well to a double

330
00:21:13,840 --> 00:21:15,399
Speaker 2: E sound, which I guess is like a like a

331
00:21:15,920 --> 00:21:17,159
Speaker 2: just knee sound, right.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So the way we would say E

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00:21:20,800 --> 00:21:22,760
Speaker 1: phonetically sounds like e.

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00:21:23,400 --> 00:21:24,120
Speaker 2: Uh.

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00:21:24,200 --> 00:21:29,600
Speaker 1: This is also fascinating because Noel the idea when you

336
00:21:29,640 --> 00:21:32,800
Speaker 1: read it, the idea of an e pronounced as an

337
00:21:33,040 --> 00:21:39,359
Speaker 1: h in modern English, it feels counterintuitive. But everybody join

338
00:21:39,480 --> 00:21:43,240
Speaker 1: us together, say E, then say eh. Then hear that

339
00:21:43,440 --> 00:21:46,080
Speaker 1: h at the end. That's where they're going.

340
00:21:46,640 --> 00:21:46,760
Speaker 4: Uh.

341
00:21:47,000 --> 00:21:51,200
Speaker 1: That that's the evolution of this. And this takes us

342
00:21:51,200 --> 00:21:54,919
Speaker 1: to another counterintuitive pronunciation, the letter.

343
00:21:55,000 --> 00:21:57,719
Speaker 2: F, one of my favorites in the whole alphabet. You

344
00:21:57,760 --> 00:22:00,360
Speaker 2: love F that's what. That's your pick of it. It's

345
00:22:00,400 --> 00:22:02,920
Speaker 2: got a good mouth sound. The letter F was also

346
00:22:02,920 --> 00:22:06,120
Speaker 2: from the Phoenicians, and it looked much more in that iteration,

347
00:22:06,440 --> 00:22:07,760
Speaker 2: like oh, why.

348
00:22:07,720 --> 00:22:10,000
Speaker 1: Shout out to the Welsh because we get it. I

349
00:22:10,600 --> 00:22:12,480
Speaker 1: was cracking on you guys earlier, but.

350
00:22:13,920 --> 00:22:18,600
Speaker 2: I totally get it. Yeah. Then it was pronounced to

351
00:22:18,680 --> 00:22:22,960
Speaker 2: make a sound kind of more like a wah like wow,

352
00:22:23,119 --> 00:22:27,280
Speaker 2: kind of like Owen Wilson talks. The ancient Greeks renamed

353
00:22:27,320 --> 00:22:31,560
Speaker 2: it to uh digamma, digamma, I believe, and tips it

354
00:22:31,640 --> 00:22:34,080
Speaker 2: over a little bit to where it resembled more of

355
00:22:34,240 --> 00:22:38,399
Speaker 2: the present day F character. The Romans then made it

356
00:22:38,480 --> 00:22:41,119
Speaker 2: look even better by giving it a bit more of

357
00:22:41,359 --> 00:22:46,200
Speaker 2: a stylized geometric shape and then changing the official phonetic

358
00:22:46,359 --> 00:22:51,720
Speaker 2: sound to a good old yeah baby hm yeah, yeah,

359
00:22:52,000 --> 00:22:54,240
Speaker 2: not a raspberry sound, just just just just a hard F.

360
00:22:54,640 --> 00:22:57,520
Speaker 1: No. Yeah, you have to be careful with the placement

361
00:22:57,560 --> 00:23:01,040
Speaker 1: of your tongue any humans tuning. And now we get

362
00:23:01,119 --> 00:23:05,240
Speaker 1: to the letter G, which weirdly enough comes from the

363
00:23:05,520 --> 00:23:09,840
Speaker 1: Zeta of the Greeks, Zeta we will call it. At first,

364
00:23:10,240 --> 00:23:14,560
Speaker 1: G looked like an I that maybe hadn't been working

365
00:23:14,640 --> 00:23:21,200
Speaker 1: out and the pronunciation made a zz sound. The Romans

366
00:23:22,080 --> 00:23:24,560
Speaker 1: took again a lot of stuff from the Greeks, and

367
00:23:24,640 --> 00:23:28,560
Speaker 1: around two point fifty BCE they said, all right, let's

368
00:23:28,640 --> 00:23:33,040
Speaker 1: differentiate this. We're gonna take this regular look and I

369
00:23:33,600 --> 00:23:36,320
Speaker 1: we're gonna give it a top arm, and we're gonna

370
00:23:36,359 --> 00:23:39,400
Speaker 1: give it a lower arm that later starts to look

371
00:23:39,480 --> 00:23:42,440
Speaker 1: kind of cradling like a hand, and we're gonna give

372
00:23:42,440 --> 00:23:49,200
Speaker 1: it a good sound. Latin didn't have a z sound.

373
00:23:49,760 --> 00:23:52,960
Speaker 1: So in the course of the development of the letter G,

374
00:23:53,880 --> 00:23:59,560
Speaker 1: those straight lines that were originally created they become curved again.

375
00:24:00,080 --> 00:24:04,040
Speaker 1: They we're seeing a rounding of things. This ends with

376
00:24:04,160 --> 00:24:08,960
Speaker 1: the present current crescent shape of the capital letter G.

377
00:24:09,280 --> 00:24:13,159
Speaker 1: And by the way, spoilers, folks, there's an entirely different

378
00:24:13,280 --> 00:24:16,040
Speaker 1: origin story for lowercase letters.

379
00:24:16,640 --> 00:24:18,840
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, we got that's a little outside of the scope,

380
00:24:18,840 --> 00:24:22,359
Speaker 2: I think in this conversation, because it's sometimes I've always wondered, like,

381
00:24:22,640 --> 00:24:24,560
Speaker 2: how do they get that from that? And I think

382
00:24:24,600 --> 00:24:27,080
Speaker 2: that is the question overall. And Ben, this does just

383
00:24:27,160 --> 00:24:29,880
Speaker 2: take a quick pause make me think of a sort

384
00:24:29,880 --> 00:24:32,840
Speaker 2: of a dumb question that I've often had. How come

385
00:24:32,920 --> 00:24:36,119
Speaker 2: if different countries and different cultures and different parts of

386
00:24:36,160 --> 00:24:40,520
Speaker 2: the world have different alphabet systems and different languages. How

387
00:24:40,560 --> 00:24:46,960
Speaker 2: come everybody agreed on the same depictions of numbers numbers Arabic? Yeah,

388
00:24:47,200 --> 00:24:48,600
Speaker 2: I get it, but I also the more I think

389
00:24:48,640 --> 00:24:52,480
Speaker 2: about it, the more it's like mathematics. It's a little

390
00:24:52,520 --> 00:24:55,119
Speaker 2: bit more indisputable. It's sort of based on at the

391
00:24:55,200 --> 00:24:57,399
Speaker 2: end of the day, like laws of nature and like,

392
00:24:57,560 --> 00:25:01,280
Speaker 2: you know, things that are kind of more concrete. Language

393
00:25:01,400 --> 00:25:03,440
Speaker 2: is something that's a lot easier to style on because

394
00:25:03,480 --> 00:25:05,760
Speaker 2: you don't really the math doesn't for lack of a

395
00:25:05,840 --> 00:25:08,119
Speaker 2: better term, have to work out in the end. So

396
00:25:08,240 --> 00:25:11,359
Speaker 2: there is a lot more kind of footloose and fancy

397
00:25:11,440 --> 00:25:14,359
Speaker 2: free styling when it comes to you know, what letters

398
00:25:14,400 --> 00:25:17,919
Speaker 2: look like and how words fit together. Whereas math, if

399
00:25:17,960 --> 00:25:20,240
Speaker 2: you kind of couldn't agree on math, and that would

400
00:25:20,240 --> 00:25:21,440
Speaker 2: cause a lot of problems.

401
00:25:22,160 --> 00:25:26,400
Speaker 1: Math is the underlying language of the reality in which

402
00:25:26,520 --> 00:25:31,000
Speaker 1: this podcast is created, such that if you met an

403
00:25:31,119 --> 00:25:36,760
Speaker 1: extra dimensional or extra terrestrial entity, your best bet in

404
00:25:36,960 --> 00:25:39,800
Speaker 1: communication would be mathematic principles.

405
00:25:40,280 --> 00:25:43,639
Speaker 2: That's right. So moving away from math and moving on

406
00:25:43,960 --> 00:25:47,720
Speaker 2: to the letter H. This one comes from the Egyptians

407
00:25:47,760 --> 00:25:49,560
Speaker 2: and was used as a symbol for a fence which

408
00:25:49,600 --> 00:25:52,120
Speaker 2: you can totally see. It looks like it's right there.

409
00:25:52,400 --> 00:25:54,920
Speaker 2: It looks like you got the little the two pickets

410
00:25:55,080 --> 00:25:57,760
Speaker 2: I guess, and then the thing you know, holding them together,

411
00:25:57,880 --> 00:26:00,680
Speaker 2: and you could just continue to string the together and

412
00:26:00,800 --> 00:26:05,400
Speaker 2: surround your property to protect you from raiders or what happened.

413
00:26:06,040 --> 00:26:09,960
Speaker 1: Later boffins were total digs about it. Can I says

414
00:26:10,080 --> 00:26:11,000
Speaker 1: on a question?

415
00:26:11,080 --> 00:26:11,399
Speaker 2: They do it?

416
00:26:12,200 --> 00:26:16,879
Speaker 1: So they said, they said, look, this makes a breathy sound,

417
00:26:17,000 --> 00:26:23,600
Speaker 1: an exhalation, and so they said, we find this unnecessary.

418
00:26:24,040 --> 00:26:27,320
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, yeah, like a passive aggressive side. So British

419
00:26:27,359 --> 00:26:31,560
Speaker 1: and Latin scholars eventually for a time dropped the letter

420
00:26:31,960 --> 00:26:37,119
Speaker 1: H from the English alphabet entirely around five hundred CE.

421
00:26:37,480 --> 00:26:41,840
Speaker 2: But look at it now, how far it's come. It

422
00:26:42,000 --> 00:26:45,680
Speaker 2: is the comeback kid. You need the H, they said.

423
00:26:45,880 --> 00:26:49,760
Speaker 1: And I don't know, we don't know if they if

424
00:26:49,800 --> 00:26:53,480
Speaker 1: they credited those early Dutch printers of the Bible.

425
00:26:53,600 --> 00:26:55,000
Speaker 2: Do you know how they say the letter H in

426
00:26:55,240 --> 00:27:00,760
Speaker 2: the UK? How h ah yes, h h yah. Yeah,

427
00:27:00,840 --> 00:27:03,120
Speaker 2: it's great, it makes perfect sense. It's a much better

428
00:27:03,160 --> 00:27:05,640
Speaker 2: indication of what it sounds like. But it always takes

429
00:27:05,720 --> 00:27:07,920
Speaker 2: me aback when I'm talking with British friends of mine,

430
00:27:07,960 --> 00:27:11,560
Speaker 2: and they say, hey, yeah, I know why I hear

431
00:27:11,600 --> 00:27:14,280
Speaker 2: a lot because in the modular synth community there's something

432
00:27:14,359 --> 00:27:18,399
Speaker 2: called HP which measures how wide a module is, and

433
00:27:18,480 --> 00:27:22,000
Speaker 2: so they're always saying hat HP HP.

434
00:27:22,680 --> 00:27:27,320
Speaker 1: And speaking of these strange stories, folks, as you were

435
00:27:27,400 --> 00:27:31,359
Speaker 1: hearing us describe the evolution of the letter G, you

436
00:27:31,440 --> 00:27:35,640
Speaker 1: were probably wondering what happened to I. It's a question

437
00:27:35,840 --> 00:27:38,160
Speaker 1: that a lot of people ask themselves in the dark

438
00:27:38,200 --> 00:27:42,800
Speaker 1: of night. The letter I was originally back in one

439
00:27:42,920 --> 00:27:48,640
Speaker 1: thousand BCE called yad and it meant hand and arm.

440
00:27:49,080 --> 00:27:52,720
Speaker 1: The Greeks later called it iota and they made it vertical,

441
00:27:52,920 --> 00:27:56,040
Speaker 1: so it used to be horizontal like a double hyphen

442
00:27:56,440 --> 00:28:00,200
Speaker 1: and then the Greeks, you know, they're flipping house is

443
00:28:00,560 --> 00:28:06,480
Speaker 1: just like reality shows on HGTV. It turned eventually into

444
00:28:06,560 --> 00:28:12,520
Speaker 1: a straight line around seven hundred BCE, so G and

445
00:28:12,960 --> 00:28:16,199
Speaker 1: I become distinct different sounds.

446
00:28:16,520 --> 00:28:18,840
Speaker 2: It's interesting too, because you know, obviously a lot of

447
00:28:18,880 --> 00:28:21,920
Speaker 2: this stuff descended from Semitic cultures that we've talked about,

448
00:28:21,960 --> 00:28:24,879
Speaker 2: and I was wondering, where have I heard yawd and

449
00:28:25,000 --> 00:28:28,480
Speaker 2: some of these other like alternate you know, past versions

450
00:28:28,520 --> 00:28:32,280
Speaker 2: of these letters, And that's it's from Hebrew. They still

451
00:28:32,320 --> 00:28:34,600
Speaker 2: exist some of these in Hebrew and yadd in the

452
00:28:34,720 --> 00:28:38,920
Speaker 2: Bible is actually a symbol of the Creator, and in

453
00:28:39,760 --> 00:28:42,680
Speaker 2: Jewish mysticism it's a very very important concept.

454
00:28:43,120 --> 00:28:49,640
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, in Kabbala and other ancient teachings. We also,

455
00:28:50,080 --> 00:28:53,000
Speaker 1: I love that you're bringing that up, because we're also

456
00:28:53,360 --> 00:28:56,720
Speaker 1: going to look at the letter J, the letter the

457
00:28:56,800 --> 00:29:00,480
Speaker 1: new one, right, the new boy, yeah kid, the block

458
00:29:00,560 --> 00:29:04,520
Speaker 1: alphabetically on the printing press, on the printer block types

459
00:29:04,560 --> 00:29:05,600
Speaker 1: that block or whatever.

460
00:29:05,720 --> 00:29:06,480
Speaker 2: We'll keep it max.

461
00:29:07,360 --> 00:29:11,280
Speaker 1: The letter I used to be a stand in for

462
00:29:11,720 --> 00:29:16,200
Speaker 1: the sound in ancient times, and it got its shape

463
00:29:16,800 --> 00:29:22,600
Speaker 1: around the fourteen hundreds as a contribution of the Spanish language.

464
00:29:22,720 --> 00:29:26,560
Speaker 1: It wasn't until about sixteen forty when the letter J

465
00:29:27,520 --> 00:29:30,400
Speaker 1: regularly appeared in print. And I want to give a

466
00:29:30,480 --> 00:29:36,480
Speaker 1: shout out to all our fellow Espanol speakers. The best

467
00:29:36,600 --> 00:29:44,040
Speaker 1: way to say ha ha ha in internet discourse is jajaja.

468
00:29:44,280 --> 00:29:46,880
Speaker 2: What I didn't know that. I'm gonna start pulling that

469
00:29:46,960 --> 00:29:50,400
Speaker 2: one out in my internet correspondence. Moving on to the

470
00:29:50,560 --> 00:29:54,440
Speaker 2: letter K. Another favorites good sound, good heart sound. When

471
00:29:54,480 --> 00:29:56,560
Speaker 2: paired with F. You know, you got to lead with

472
00:29:56,600 --> 00:29:58,560
Speaker 2: an F and then with a K. That's a fun word.

473
00:29:59,360 --> 00:30:01,640
Speaker 2: It's an old lest and it comes from the Egyptian

474
00:30:01,720 --> 00:30:05,760
Speaker 2: hieroglyphics system as well. In the Semitic language we were

475
00:30:05,840 --> 00:30:08,320
Speaker 2: just talking about giving credit to. It was given the

476
00:30:08,400 --> 00:30:13,200
Speaker 2: name kuff, which translates to palm of the hand. Yeah, exactly.

477
00:30:13,480 --> 00:30:15,320
Speaker 2: And what Ben's doing his hand right now, He's doing

478
00:30:15,360 --> 00:30:17,760
Speaker 2: a little flippy two of his hand. And in those times,

479
00:30:17,800 --> 00:30:20,280
Speaker 2: the letter faced once again the other way, and when

480
00:30:20,280 --> 00:30:23,320
Speaker 2: the Greeks adopted an eight hundred BCE, it became kappa.

481
00:30:23,640 --> 00:30:25,880
Speaker 2: A lot of these these these words might be familiar

482
00:30:25,920 --> 00:30:28,640
Speaker 2: to any uh, you know, any folks out there in

483
00:30:29,000 --> 00:30:32,520
Speaker 2: fraternities or sororities, of course. And they also then flipped

484
00:30:32,520 --> 00:30:33,640
Speaker 2: it to the rights.

485
00:30:34,280 --> 00:30:38,320
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if we move on, you know what, I

486
00:30:38,400 --> 00:30:43,840
Speaker 1: don't want anybody to take an L here, ah, So

487
00:30:44,120 --> 00:30:55,000
Speaker 1: let's explore it together. The present day letter L was

488
00:30:55,200 --> 00:30:58,480
Speaker 1: once upon a time what we would call upside down,

489
00:30:58,920 --> 00:31:02,960
Speaker 1: so it looked like a hooked letter, almost like the

490
00:31:03,120 --> 00:31:05,720
Speaker 1: way you would draw the old Hangman game.

491
00:31:05,880 --> 00:31:08,200
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, the gallows, Yes, sir.

492
00:31:08,720 --> 00:31:12,240
Speaker 1: It was already called L, which meant, you know, God,

493
00:31:12,400 --> 00:31:16,160
Speaker 1: the unnameable, the holy, and the Phoenicians said, all right,

494
00:31:16,320 --> 00:31:19,040
Speaker 1: first off, we're going to face this hook the other way.

495
00:31:19,240 --> 00:31:21,840
Speaker 1: They flipped it. They made it such that the hook

496
00:31:22,000 --> 00:31:25,080
Speaker 1: was facing left. They straightened the hook a bit. They

497
00:31:25,280 --> 00:31:30,200
Speaker 1: changed the name to lamed. And this was entirely just

498
00:31:30,320 --> 00:31:33,800
Speaker 1: like the earlier story with a boomerang or a hunting stick,

499
00:31:34,320 --> 00:31:37,480
Speaker 1: this was a goat prae. This was meant to beat

500
00:31:37,600 --> 00:31:39,520
Speaker 1: the snot out of goats.

501
00:31:39,320 --> 00:31:42,080
Speaker 2: Right, and then those eventually evolved into the electric versions

502
00:31:42,160 --> 00:31:45,280
Speaker 2: that we know today. I just I can't get over.

503
00:31:45,360 --> 00:31:47,240
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe this is just obvious to everybody but me,

504
00:31:47,360 --> 00:31:49,239
Speaker 2: but like, no, it's a little obvious to me too,

505
00:31:49,360 --> 00:31:51,920
Speaker 2: But just how so much of this stuff is just

506
00:31:52,040 --> 00:31:54,520
Speaker 2: a product of somebody making a decision in the moment

507
00:31:54,640 --> 00:31:59,520
Speaker 2: because it seemed like more aesthetically pleasing, you know, I

508
00:31:59,560 --> 00:32:01,080
Speaker 2: would are you also? It might be.

509
00:32:02,560 --> 00:32:05,640
Speaker 1: It might be one of two factors. Either you have

510
00:32:06,520 --> 00:32:10,360
Speaker 1: a need to make your mark upon the world, make

511
00:32:10,400 --> 00:32:15,840
Speaker 1: your mark literally alphabets, or there was something more convenient

512
00:32:16,120 --> 00:32:19,800
Speaker 1: or more cost effective to do in terms of time.

513
00:32:20,560 --> 00:32:23,560
Speaker 1: And then a later civilization comes along, just like the

514
00:32:23,680 --> 00:32:27,200
Speaker 1: Greeks with the letter L, they call this stuff lambda,

515
00:32:27,400 --> 00:32:30,280
Speaker 1: and they turn it around again now it faces right

516
00:32:30,520 --> 00:32:34,760
Speaker 1: the final look of what we call the letter L today,

517
00:32:35,200 --> 00:32:38,760
Speaker 1: the one with the straight foot at a right angle,

518
00:32:39,360 --> 00:32:42,080
Speaker 1: that comes to us from the Romans.

519
00:32:42,400 --> 00:32:44,520
Speaker 2: And yeah, which makes sense, I mean, because it's like

520
00:32:44,640 --> 00:32:47,360
Speaker 2: it's also like the most quintessential version of the L

521
00:32:47,840 --> 00:32:49,800
Speaker 2: I think we all think of and we're picturing it

522
00:32:49,960 --> 00:32:54,600
Speaker 2: is in that times new Roman fun the seraph being

523
00:32:54,640 --> 00:32:56,720
Speaker 2: the little the little uh what do you call it,

524
00:32:56,880 --> 00:33:00,360
Speaker 2: kind of flourish on the end of the footalk about it.

525
00:33:00,360 --> 00:33:02,640
Speaker 2: And also, I mean it really resembles kind of like

526
00:33:02,680 --> 00:33:06,400
Speaker 2: a Roman numeral in a way too. Moving on next,

527
00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:10,040
Speaker 2: back to the Egyptians, we've got the letter M. The

528
00:33:10,160 --> 00:33:13,280
Speaker 2: origin of M was kind of of the wavy vertical

529
00:33:13,360 --> 00:33:17,400
Speaker 2: lines with five peaks that would symbolize water at least

530
00:33:17,440 --> 00:33:19,960
Speaker 2: if you're Egyptians at least. Yeah, we're back with the

531
00:33:20,040 --> 00:33:24,720
Speaker 2: Egyptians again. In eighteen hundred BCE, the Semites simplified the

532
00:33:24,800 --> 00:33:28,320
Speaker 2: design a little bit, reduced it to three waves, and

533
00:33:28,400 --> 00:33:31,400
Speaker 2: then the Phoenicians removed one more of the waves, so

534
00:33:31,480 --> 00:33:34,400
Speaker 2: by eight hundred BCE the peaks were turned into zigzags

535
00:33:34,440 --> 00:33:36,800
Speaker 2: and then flipped horizontally to form what we know and

536
00:33:36,880 --> 00:33:39,040
Speaker 2: love today as the letter M.

537
00:33:41,400 --> 00:33:44,080
Speaker 1: And that's why I was saying, we're getting into it

538
00:33:45,200 --> 00:33:49,280
Speaker 1: right over my head, budd We could do it for

539
00:33:49,480 --> 00:33:52,160
Speaker 1: the letter N, which is believe it or not, folks,

540
00:33:52,200 --> 00:33:57,959
Speaker 1: another Egyptian symbol. It originally looked like a small ripple

541
00:33:58,240 --> 00:34:01,960
Speaker 1: atop a larger ripple. It did not stand for water,

542
00:34:02,200 --> 00:34:07,040
Speaker 1: but it stood for something. Old fans of animals will

543
00:34:07,200 --> 00:34:13,200
Speaker 1: recognize our very fluid reptilian friends, the serpent, the snake,

544
00:34:13,520 --> 00:34:18,200
Speaker 1: the cobra. It was given the sound by ancient Semites,

545
00:34:18,520 --> 00:34:22,320
Speaker 1: and they said, you know, scales, this means fish.

546
00:34:22,400 --> 00:34:24,720
Speaker 2: To us quo, I mean fish is a lot less scary.

547
00:34:24,760 --> 00:34:27,080
Speaker 2: I bet some people with with snake phobias might have

548
00:34:27,120 --> 00:34:30,759
Speaker 2: been spooked by that original version. I'm more frightened by

549
00:34:30,800 --> 00:34:35,040
Speaker 2: big fish than yeah, I guess that's true. So around

550
00:34:35,080 --> 00:34:39,160
Speaker 2: one thousand BCE, just one ripple appeared, and the Greeks

551
00:34:39,239 --> 00:34:42,920
Speaker 2: decided in their infinite wisdom to name it new Oh

552
00:34:43,160 --> 00:34:48,920
Speaker 2: and you like new metal, Oh, amazing genre from the

553
00:34:48,960 --> 00:34:50,400
Speaker 2: two thousands oh.

554
00:34:50,640 --> 00:34:54,719
Speaker 1: Letter that also came from the Egyptians as well. Originally,

555
00:34:54,880 --> 00:34:57,400
Speaker 1: all right, this makes sense to everyone. It was called

556
00:34:57,560 --> 00:35:01,920
Speaker 1: I the Egyptians and Iron Uh for the Semites. Pardon

557
00:35:02,040 --> 00:35:02,839
Speaker 1: the pronunciation.

558
00:35:02,960 --> 00:35:03,120
Speaker 2: There.

559
00:35:03,520 --> 00:35:07,920
Speaker 1: The Phoenicians took that hieroglyphic, that logogram, they further reduced

560
00:35:07,960 --> 00:35:11,600
Speaker 1: it and they just left the outline of the pupil.

561
00:35:12,120 --> 00:35:16,080
Speaker 1: So that is why the why we'll get to it.

562
00:35:16,640 --> 00:35:20,960
Speaker 1: That is why the oh became the sound it is

563
00:35:21,280 --> 00:35:25,520
Speaker 1: now instead of the eye. But originally it represented someone

564
00:35:25,680 --> 00:35:26,279
Speaker 1: looking at you.

565
00:35:26,960 --> 00:35:30,600
Speaker 2: Oh, exactly, yeah, uh huh. So moving on to P.

566
00:35:31,080 --> 00:35:33,960
Speaker 2: In the ancient Semitic language, today's letter P looked a

567
00:35:34,000 --> 00:35:37,719
Speaker 2: lot more like an inverted V. It was pronounced P

568
00:35:38,239 --> 00:35:41,400
Speaker 2: or pay maybe I think P, which meant mouth, and

569
00:35:41,480 --> 00:35:44,520
Speaker 2: the Phoenicians turned its top into a diagonal hook shape,

570
00:35:45,160 --> 00:35:48,040
Speaker 2: then into hundred BCE. The Romans, once again with their

571
00:35:48,160 --> 00:35:51,200
Speaker 2: there once again flipped crazy. These Romans flipped it to

572
00:35:51,239 --> 00:35:54,000
Speaker 2: the right and closed the loop to form the P,

573
00:35:54,400 --> 00:35:56,880
Speaker 2: the capital P that we know today.

574
00:35:57,520 --> 00:36:00,200
Speaker 1: Ooh, and now we're getting into the deep water. It's

575
00:36:00,480 --> 00:36:05,080
Speaker 1: just like if you are a student of the periodic

576
00:36:05,200 --> 00:36:08,960
Speaker 1: table in science. I noticed that at the end you

577
00:36:09,080 --> 00:36:12,359
Speaker 1: get to the real weird ones. This is the end

578
00:36:12,560 --> 00:36:14,600
Speaker 1: of the alphabet here.

579
00:36:15,440 --> 00:36:16,200
Speaker 2: I love this stuff.

580
00:36:16,239 --> 00:36:20,359
Speaker 1: We'll keep it brief so that our producer Max does

581
00:36:20,440 --> 00:36:24,120
Speaker 1: not kill us. Q. The original sound of the letter

582
00:36:24,239 --> 00:36:25,960
Speaker 1: Q was like, help.

583
00:36:25,840 --> 00:36:31,200
Speaker 2: Me with this. When they'll quaff quote boy quoth, let's

584
00:36:31,280 --> 00:36:34,920
Speaker 2: see quoth. Maybe I don't know, there's not It's hard

585
00:36:34,960 --> 00:36:37,200
Speaker 2: to say because again we've got these silent letters sometimes

586
00:36:37,239 --> 00:36:40,400
Speaker 2: that make a wah or an o sound. I'm gonna

587
00:36:40,400 --> 00:36:44,000
Speaker 2: go with kof maybe even. But yeah, who are we

588
00:36:44,120 --> 00:36:44,480
Speaker 2: to say?

589
00:36:44,960 --> 00:36:49,400
Speaker 1: If you have a Maryland accent, you would say queve uh.

590
00:36:49,680 --> 00:36:53,719
Speaker 1: This translates to a ball of wool or weirdly enough,

591
00:36:53,960 --> 00:36:57,920
Speaker 1: a monkey. It was originally a circle that was traversed

592
00:36:57,960 --> 00:37:02,160
Speaker 1: by a vertical line in inscriptions. Around five hundred and

593
00:37:02,239 --> 00:37:06,719
Speaker 1: twenty BCE, the letter started to appear as we know

594
00:37:06,880 --> 00:37:10,440
Speaker 1: it today. Now we got to get to our buddy,

595
00:37:11,360 --> 00:37:12,160
Speaker 1: the letter R.

596
00:37:12,880 --> 00:37:17,760
Speaker 2: Yes, indeed, the letter are. The profile of a human

597
00:37:18,080 --> 00:37:22,200
Speaker 2: facing left was originally the concept behind the letter R

598
00:37:22,880 --> 00:37:25,800
Speaker 2: as written by the Semites. Once again, it was pronounced

599
00:37:25,800 --> 00:37:30,040
Speaker 2: at that point rash, which meant head. The Romans once

600
00:37:30,120 --> 00:37:32,960
Speaker 2: again turned it to the right. Yeah, no way, Yeah,

601
00:37:33,080 --> 00:37:35,680
Speaker 2: they did it. They did it, those rascally Romans. And

602
00:37:35,800 --> 00:37:39,560
Speaker 2: they added an inclined foot so that kind of slanted

603
00:37:39,640 --> 00:37:42,400
Speaker 2: little little guy sticking his little foot out almost like

604
00:37:42,400 --> 00:37:44,920
Speaker 2: in a little I don't know, pirouette kind of gesture.

605
00:37:45,880 --> 00:37:47,960
Speaker 2: He said it in these das, it's like he's put

606
00:37:48,000 --> 00:37:49,799
Speaker 2: poking his leg out of his showing a little leg

607
00:37:49,880 --> 00:37:51,680
Speaker 2: out from under the skirt. There it is, look at

608
00:37:51,719 --> 00:37:52,400
Speaker 2: those gams.

609
00:37:53,320 --> 00:37:57,880
Speaker 1: We also want to move to the letter S. R.

610
00:37:58,000 --> 00:38:03,520
Speaker 1: Palinol mentioned earlier the origin or evolution of the W.

611
00:38:04,280 --> 00:38:07,960
Speaker 1: The letter S used to look like a horizontal W,

612
00:38:08,360 --> 00:38:11,440
Speaker 1: but kind of wavy. It was supposed to mean the

613
00:38:11,640 --> 00:38:15,480
Speaker 1: bow of an archer. The angular nature of the shape

614
00:38:15,560 --> 00:38:19,200
Speaker 1: comes from the Phoenicians. They gave it the name ship

615
00:38:19,880 --> 00:38:23,840
Speaker 1: and in their language that translated to tooth. You're not

616
00:38:24,000 --> 00:38:27,239
Speaker 1: gonna believe it, folks. The Romans flipped it.

617
00:38:28,160 --> 00:38:34,240
Speaker 2: How could they? Right? Unprecedented Romans, they're just flipping willy

618
00:38:34,320 --> 00:38:35,040
Speaker 2: and or nilly.

619
00:38:35,600 --> 00:38:35,799
Speaker 4: Yeah.

620
00:38:35,960 --> 00:38:39,080
Speaker 1: They named it sigma. A lot of flippy doo on

621
00:38:39,200 --> 00:38:39,840
Speaker 1: their side, and.

622
00:38:40,600 --> 00:38:46,320
Speaker 2: The gen Alpha kids love the sigma. Oh gosh, Ohio

623
00:38:46,600 --> 00:38:47,080
Speaker 2: shut up.

624
00:38:47,760 --> 00:38:47,880
Speaker 4: Uh.

625
00:38:48,200 --> 00:38:52,000
Speaker 1: The ancient Semites use the lower case form of the

626
00:38:52,120 --> 00:38:55,400
Speaker 1: letter T that you see today today.

627
00:38:55,840 --> 00:38:55,960
Speaker 2: Uh.

628
00:38:56,280 --> 00:38:59,919
Speaker 1: They called it tall, and the way that they would

629
00:39:00,000 --> 00:39:05,399
Speaker 1: announced it would sound like T, like golf T when

630
00:39:05,440 --> 00:39:08,000
Speaker 1: they spoke it aloud. The Greeks didn't know what was

631
00:39:08,080 --> 00:39:10,960
Speaker 1: going on, so they called it Tao, and they added

632
00:39:11,040 --> 00:39:14,239
Speaker 1: the cross at the top of the letter when it's

633
00:39:14,280 --> 00:39:17,319
Speaker 1: in capital form because they didn't want people to get

634
00:39:17,360 --> 00:39:19,560
Speaker 1: it confused with the letter X.

635
00:39:20,320 --> 00:39:23,719
Speaker 2: Moving on to the letter you and the numeral too.

636
00:39:23,840 --> 00:39:26,800
Speaker 2: For any negative land fans out there, the letter you

637
00:39:27,080 --> 00:39:30,480
Speaker 2: initially looked like why in one thousand BCE, and at

638
00:39:30,520 --> 00:39:34,080
Speaker 2: that time it was called wow. It was the wow

639
00:39:34,360 --> 00:39:37,800
Speaker 2: at that point that meant peg, because of course it didn't.

640
00:39:38,160 --> 00:39:42,880
Speaker 2: Under the Greeks, it was called oopsilon big oops.

641
00:39:44,080 --> 00:39:46,600
Speaker 1: So now we get to again, we're getting to the

642
00:39:46,640 --> 00:39:49,200
Speaker 1: weird stuff at the end of the alphabet. The Romans

643
00:39:49,760 --> 00:39:54,440
Speaker 1: in their day, they used the letter V and you interchangeably.

644
00:39:54,640 --> 00:39:56,879
Speaker 1: This is part of why in episode one we said

645
00:39:57,000 --> 00:40:01,719
Speaker 1: V is a weird case study. The distinction between V

646
00:40:02,719 --> 00:40:05,960
Speaker 1: and other letters didn't start to appear until around the

647
00:40:06,120 --> 00:40:09,560
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred, so that's pretty recent in the grand scheme

648
00:40:09,640 --> 00:40:12,800
Speaker 1: of things. And this is where we get to a

649
00:40:13,120 --> 00:40:17,920
Speaker 1: great note of appreciation for all the folks who figured

650
00:40:17,920 --> 00:40:22,080
Speaker 1: out this alphabet beforehand. We could not be able to

651
00:40:22,320 --> 00:40:27,640
Speaker 1: pronounce the name of our super producer, Max Williams without

652
00:40:27,719 --> 00:40:30,480
Speaker 1: the work of the scribes of Charlemagne.

653
00:40:31,360 --> 00:40:35,520
Speaker 2: Indeed, and now we're finally getting that W. Ben. We

654
00:40:35,880 --> 00:40:38,080
Speaker 2: took an L earlier, and now we are going for

655
00:40:38,200 --> 00:40:41,719
Speaker 2: the W, which is also pretty recent because, as you

656
00:40:41,719 --> 00:40:45,480
Speaker 2: can imagine, ridiculous historians, it sort of says what it is,

657
00:40:45,560 --> 00:40:47,440
Speaker 2: it doesn't it. It sort of tells you exactly what

658
00:40:47,560 --> 00:40:50,640
Speaker 2: it is. It's like to u's side by side, thanks

659
00:40:50,680 --> 00:40:53,840
Speaker 2: to the scribes of Charlemagne. To your point, Ben, the

660
00:40:53,920 --> 00:40:57,520
Speaker 2: letter W started during the Middle Ages. It was initially

661
00:40:57,719 --> 00:41:00,640
Speaker 2: represented with two u's next to one another, separated by

662
00:41:00,680 --> 00:41:04,120
Speaker 2: a space at the time, like in emoji. Like just

663
00:41:04,280 --> 00:41:05,520
Speaker 2: so we're going to get to a little bit of

664
00:41:05,520 --> 00:41:08,399
Speaker 2: emoji talk at the end here too. At the time

665
00:41:08,520 --> 00:41:10,279
Speaker 2: the sound was a little bit closer to what we

666
00:41:10,360 --> 00:41:13,120
Speaker 2: might think of as a V sound, and the letter

667
00:41:13,239 --> 00:41:15,960
Speaker 2: then began to appear in print as a brand new

668
00:41:16,239 --> 00:41:21,480
Speaker 2: unique letter W like we know the W in seventeen hundred.

669
00:41:21,600 --> 00:41:26,239
Speaker 1: Seventeen hundred Common Era AD. This is where we get

670
00:41:26,280 --> 00:41:30,120
Speaker 1: to also, of course, X, the letter SI of the

671
00:41:30,320 --> 00:41:35,759
Speaker 1: ancient Greeks. The lowercase version was seen in handwritten manuscripts

672
00:41:36,480 --> 00:41:41,279
Speaker 1: during medieval times. Not the restaurant my favorite checked it

673
00:41:41,680 --> 00:41:43,279
Speaker 1: all right, I just know it from the cable guy.

674
00:41:43,840 --> 00:41:44,319
Speaker 2: It's fun.

675
00:41:44,520 --> 00:41:49,399
Speaker 1: We should we should take absolutely it'll be ironically fun.

676
00:41:49,719 --> 00:41:54,480
Speaker 1: And there's a bunch of printers in the late fourteen hundreds,

677
00:41:54,680 --> 00:41:59,239
Speaker 1: guys in Italy. They're using lowercase x's, And now I

678
00:41:59,320 --> 00:42:03,040
Speaker 1: would argue it is an integral part of every SoundCloud

679
00:42:03,200 --> 00:42:04,719
Speaker 1: rapper's MC name.

680
00:42:04,960 --> 00:42:08,279
Speaker 2: Not to mention, man, you pronounced that SI version with

681
00:42:08,360 --> 00:42:11,960
Speaker 2: the silent k on paper, it's KSI, and I kind

682
00:42:12,000 --> 00:42:14,600
Speaker 2: of wonder speaking of SoundCloud rapper types. I don't know

683
00:42:14,600 --> 00:42:19,040
Speaker 2: if you're familiar with this somewhat problematic YouTuber named KSI,

684
00:42:20,080 --> 00:42:23,840
Speaker 2: whose buddies with Jake Paul and all those rabbele rousers.

685
00:42:23,960 --> 00:42:26,520
Speaker 2: A bunch of bunch of kind of heels they are.

686
00:42:26,800 --> 00:42:30,600
Speaker 2: But he recently became the subject of some serious Internet

687
00:42:30,719 --> 00:42:34,400
Speaker 2: roasting with his new SoundCloud rapper esque song called in

688
00:42:34,520 --> 00:42:36,200
Speaker 2: the Thick of It, where he says something to the

689
00:42:36,239 --> 00:42:39,320
Speaker 2: effect of from the screen to the ring to the

690
00:42:39,520 --> 00:42:42,959
Speaker 2: pen to the king, something something something something that my bling.

691
00:42:43,120 --> 00:42:45,000
Speaker 2: You know, it's really really embarrassing. It sounds like a

692
00:42:45,040 --> 00:42:47,919
Speaker 2: backyard against theme song. So I hope that guy's doing okay.

693
00:42:47,960 --> 00:42:49,799
Speaker 2: He got pretty roasted and he just did the thing

694
00:42:49,880 --> 00:42:52,240
Speaker 2: you're not supposed to do where he just kept answering

695
00:42:52,320 --> 00:42:54,919
Speaker 2: the roasts and doubling down and then calling those people

696
00:42:54,960 --> 00:42:57,200
Speaker 2: big ol' meanies, and that they just didn't understand his genius.

697
00:42:57,400 --> 00:42:58,799
Speaker 2: So are the songs good?

698
00:42:59,040 --> 00:42:59,080
Speaker 1: No?

699
00:42:59,600 --> 00:43:04,320
Speaker 2: No, ks I, I hope you're okay. Here's to the

700
00:43:04,640 --> 00:43:05,799
Speaker 2: here's to the next song.

701
00:43:05,920 --> 00:43:10,719
Speaker 1: But you know, there's always an opportunity, right, Everything has

702
00:43:10,760 --> 00:43:16,359
Speaker 1: a future, especially the letter why we mentioned this, you're right,

703
00:43:16,560 --> 00:43:20,799
Speaker 1: started out as upsilon or upsilon. It was added by

704
00:43:20,840 --> 00:43:24,360
Speaker 1: the Romans one ce. Now we got to go to

705
00:43:24,680 --> 00:43:28,759
Speaker 1: z Phoenicians back in the day again, as you can tell,

706
00:43:29,000 --> 00:43:31,200
Speaker 1: ridiculous historians, they were a big deal.

707
00:43:31,320 --> 00:43:32,240
Speaker 2: They had a letter.

708
00:43:32,160 --> 00:43:37,560
Speaker 1: Called Zion and it meant acts z A Y I N.

709
00:43:37,880 --> 00:43:42,080
Speaker 1: We would spell it phonetically now phoenicianally now uh. It

710
00:43:42,200 --> 00:43:44,799
Speaker 1: first looked like the letter I, and it just had

711
00:43:44,880 --> 00:43:48,560
Speaker 1: some fancy flourishes, some seraphs at the top and bottom,

712
00:43:48,640 --> 00:43:52,920
Speaker 1: little daily bops. The Greeks adopted it as zeta and

713
00:43:53,120 --> 00:43:59,800
Speaker 1: they gave it the sound yeah zip yeah, and it

714
00:44:00,160 --> 00:44:06,480
Speaker 1: was it used for several centuries until the Normans invaded

715
00:44:07,200 --> 00:44:11,000
Speaker 1: what we call the United Kingdom today and they said, hey,

716
00:44:11,120 --> 00:44:14,440
Speaker 1: we have a language that needs the sound of the

717
00:44:14,600 --> 00:44:19,120
Speaker 1: letter or needs the sound, and that's how we got Z.

718
00:44:19,520 --> 00:44:22,960
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, and that's how we wrap up this discussion

719
00:44:23,080 --> 00:44:26,040
Speaker 2: of the English alphabet. Man I kind of teased that, Ben,

720
00:44:26,120 --> 00:44:28,399
Speaker 2: so I don't want to leave the folks at home

721
00:44:28,480 --> 00:44:30,560
Speaker 2: without a dope beat to steps up too. We just

722
00:44:30,640 --> 00:44:32,879
Speaker 2: talked about a little bit briefly just how so many

723
00:44:32,920 --> 00:44:37,160
Speaker 2: of these things were derived initially from kind of emoji

724
00:44:37,560 --> 00:44:40,200
Speaker 2: like symbols and then kind of came to be repurposed

725
00:44:40,239 --> 00:44:44,000
Speaker 2: as phonetic sounds. We have whole cultures that use symbols

726
00:44:44,040 --> 00:44:47,440
Speaker 2: to represent concepts, and Ben, you pointed out in your

727
00:44:47,480 --> 00:44:50,840
Speaker 2: incredible outline here, and I completely agree that it feels

728
00:44:50,840 --> 00:44:54,479
Speaker 2: as though we might be heading towards the future where

729
00:44:54,960 --> 00:44:57,480
Speaker 2: the written word is kind of continuing to be dumbed

730
00:44:57,560 --> 00:45:00,200
Speaker 2: down and may well be going the way of the

731
00:45:00,280 --> 00:45:05,200
Speaker 2: dinosaurs in favor of emojis, which honestly, there's a benefit

732
00:45:05,239 --> 00:45:09,320
Speaker 2: there because they are universally understandable and there is dictated,

733
00:45:09,360 --> 00:45:11,879
Speaker 2: I guess by the powers that be at Apple, sort

734
00:45:11,880 --> 00:45:14,600
Speaker 2: of an emoji alphabet. They decide which ones go in,

735
00:45:14,760 --> 00:45:17,320
Speaker 2: which ones don't, and which new ones get added. And

736
00:45:17,360 --> 00:45:19,440
Speaker 2: I've always wonder what the politics of that is. It's

737
00:45:19,480 --> 00:45:20,360
Speaker 2: got to be fascinating.

738
00:45:21,320 --> 00:45:25,520
Speaker 1: Yeah, many variables evolved. Now, First, good news for every

739
00:45:25,680 --> 00:45:29,960
Speaker 1: writer and ardent reader in the crowd. The written word

740
00:45:30,600 --> 00:45:36,040
Speaker 1: never goes away. It may evolve over time, however, the

741
00:45:36,160 --> 00:45:40,200
Speaker 1: horse has left the barn. As far as human communication goes,

742
00:45:40,480 --> 00:45:45,040
Speaker 1: Emoji are simple drawings pictures of anything you might imagine,

743
00:45:45,239 --> 00:45:49,600
Speaker 1: often used in place of words written in different alphabets

744
00:45:50,080 --> 00:45:54,680
Speaker 1: to convey ideas. Visually, everything we said about writing holds

745
00:45:54,800 --> 00:45:58,560
Speaker 1: true for emojis. Again, name check to or shout out

746
00:45:58,640 --> 00:46:03,840
Speaker 1: to Episode one. Entire novels have been written in emoji

747
00:46:04,080 --> 00:46:07,560
Speaker 1: as we speak, So it is not impossible to imagine

748
00:46:07,600 --> 00:46:12,520
Speaker 1: a world wherein these symbols become their own kind of language.

749
00:46:12,600 --> 00:46:15,919
Speaker 1: And the beautiful thing about this, the beautiful thing about

750
00:46:15,960 --> 00:46:20,279
Speaker 1: the human experiment, is that this could unify people, right,

751
00:46:20,440 --> 00:46:24,520
Speaker 1: could reduce friction and conversation. Someone who is a native

752
00:46:24,600 --> 00:46:29,560
Speaker 1: Mandarin speaker or someone who is speaking Cantonese, they can

753
00:46:29,760 --> 00:46:34,759
Speaker 1: interact with someone who speaks English just through emojis. Now,

754
00:46:34,840 --> 00:46:36,400
Speaker 1: they're gonna miss a lot of nuance.

755
00:46:36,840 --> 00:46:38,000
Speaker 2: Sure, it's what I mean.

756
00:46:38,840 --> 00:46:41,360
Speaker 5: We're not really living in a time of great nuance,

757
00:46:41,440 --> 00:46:44,680
Speaker 5: though I would argue you unfortunately things are a little

758
00:46:44,719 --> 00:46:47,400
Speaker 5: bit more of a blunt instrument in terms of language,

759
00:46:48,080 --> 00:46:49,960
Speaker 5: you know, for better or for worse, though, it is

760
00:46:50,239 --> 00:46:53,440
Speaker 5: another evolution and whether you're on board with it or not,

761
00:46:53,640 --> 00:46:55,439
Speaker 5: it is something that's fascinating to track.

762
00:46:55,920 --> 00:47:00,600
Speaker 1: And with this we thank you, fellow Ridiculous Historian, so

763
00:47:00,800 --> 00:47:03,319
Speaker 1: much as always for tuning in. We're at the end

764
00:47:03,400 --> 00:47:06,200
Speaker 1: of the calendar year, as the humans call it. Shout

765
00:47:06,239 --> 00:47:09,200
Speaker 1: out to our super producer, mister Max Williams.

766
00:47:08,920 --> 00:47:12,919
Speaker 2: Max the Phoenician Williams. That's his gangster name. Huge thanks

767
00:47:12,960 --> 00:47:17,120
Speaker 2: to you is Chris Fraciota's names Jeff Coates here in spirits.

768
00:47:16,960 --> 00:47:20,640
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, who composed this bang and track our fellow

769
00:47:20,840 --> 00:47:24,279
Speaker 1: rude dudes over at Ridiculous Crime. Check out their show.

770
00:47:24,360 --> 00:47:26,279
Speaker 1: If you like us, you'll love them.

771
00:47:26,840 --> 00:47:29,919
Speaker 2: Indeed, did we say Alex Williams to compose our theme?

772
00:47:30,200 --> 00:47:32,920
Speaker 2: We did? Okay, Well, that's so she's so rad We

773
00:47:33,040 --> 00:47:36,680
Speaker 2: said it twice. That isn't rhyme, but that's okay. Thanks

774
00:47:36,719 --> 00:47:38,799
Speaker 2: to you, Ben for putting together this incredible two parter

775
00:47:38,960 --> 00:47:41,600
Speaker 2: on the history of the English language. That's no small feat.

776
00:47:41,920 --> 00:47:44,800
Speaker 1: And you did it with Flair, Hey Noel, and also

777
00:47:44,880 --> 00:47:48,400
Speaker 1: with you, I owe you and sometimes why I saved

778
00:47:48,440 --> 00:47:50,239
Speaker 1: that joke for way too long.

779
00:47:50,320 --> 00:47:51,680
Speaker 2: I think we made it at the very top. I

780
00:47:51,719 --> 00:47:54,839
Speaker 2: said we owe each other in fact, get it. Yeah,

781
00:47:55,080 --> 00:47:58,160
Speaker 2: I'm doing a vowel joke. Aha. I see, We'll circle.

782
00:47:58,320 --> 00:48:06,960
Speaker 2: I love it. We'll see you next time, folks. For

783
00:48:07,080 --> 00:48:10,680
Speaker 2: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

784
00:48:10,800 --> 00:48:12,880
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,