1362: Danny Bate | Why English Spelling Is a Beautiful Mess

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23:39I'm happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Danny Bate. It does seem bizarre to me that an advanced civilization was like, I don't need to ever write anything down. I don't need to transmit something I'm going to say over a long distance without just sending somebody to do it for me. That just seems so bizarre to anybody in our day and age that you could possibly get along with doing this. Meanwhile, you have tens of thousands or whatever of square, or millions, whatever of square miles of territory. story and it's like, nah, writing, who needs it?

24:12Ancient Egypt, take us back 4 ,000 years ago, because hieroglyphics, this to me is bizarre. I always assumed that these were merely decorative and that they were ceremonial or poetic or something, but you didn't read them. But I learned later that they actually have sounds. It's basically just a really complicated alphabet that took forever to etch in and color. Yeah, that's fair. Hieroglyphs back in the day of ancient Egypt existed on a kind of spectrum. So you absolutely had the hieroglyphs that were members of the system that were art. They were high art. They were fit for inscribing on the walls of the pharaoh's tomb and on pharaoh's monuments, and they are clearly meant to be beautiful.

24:55But nonetheless, they do exist as part of a system and on one end of a spectrum of writing down of language. And at the other end of that spectrum, we have very humble kinds of hieroglyphs that are still really the same symbols, but the way that they're being used, the way that they're being written, is intended for quick comprehension and easy scribbling. The first of these is called hieratic. Later, this develops into something called demotic, which is like the last developmental stage of hieroglyphs before it gives way to Greek letters and writing down Coptic. It's all writing down one particular spoken language, which is Egyptian.

25:32Very handily, we call it the Egyptian language. But the thing is, hieroglyphs are extremely old. Forget about those two kind of developments that I mentioned. In their basic system of looking like things, little pictograms, this is a system that goes back from our day and age, maybe 5 ,000 years. I think I hesitantly dated to about 1 ,000 years before our alphabet is born as an offshoot. It's a very radical offshoot. or for all those thousand years beforehand hieroglyphs are being used to transmit information in the egyptian language it's complicated though some in this system let's say by the year 2000 bc some are absolutely still representing objects and things the things that they happen to look like but through a kind of game of association some of those symbols are now standing not for the object or for the word that that object is known by, but rather a sound or two sounds or three sounds in that word.

26:34And once you've got a symbol associated with a sound, you can use it for other words that contain that sound. And you can also use hieroglyphs as a sort of marker of category. You put a little figure of a man or a woman or a god next to the name of a man or woman or a god or something like that. These are called determinatives. And you get a system which Which absolutely, in its highest, most elevated, most artistic form, it's very complicated. And it absolutely preserves or the preserve of professionals to write this down. But lower down in Egyptian society, absolutely, people are using these symbols and writing down speech.

27:11So you might have a crate of, I don't know, clay pots. And you're like, OK, I got to put a bird, a cat, a guy wearing a big hat and an ankh on here. This is going to take a while. Let me get my intern to handle this. Because it seems like you have to have artistic talent to do that, right? Whereas I don't need artistic talent to have pretty messy but still legible handwriting. Exactly that. And that's what we see. I mentioned those sort of developments, the later developments, hieratic, demotic. They are not artistic. I don't want to call them scribbles. They're still quite nice to read, but they're absolutely something much more recognizably.

27:44They're an alphabet. They're an alphabet of abstract symbols. They don't look like things, to be honest, by this point in time. They look like symbols which you know how to read. And yeah, it's something that could spread through the population at large and did indeed spread through the population. But absolutely, the symbols that people be much more familiar with, you might lead that to your main scribe or one of many interns. It was a profession back in those days. Right. Writing and probably also reading most things that weren't super simple. Who invented hieroglyphics? Do we even know or is that just lost to the sands of time?

28:19Oh, very nicely put. Yeah, the cool pun in there. No big deal. I do appreciate that. Sands of time. Very nice. Very appropriate. And of course, the earliest stuff comes from the sands of Egypt. Egypt is not just actually important. It is also important because its climate preserves lots of things for us, which is really helpful for doing the business of history and archaeology. I can't really put it any more clearly or precisely than the Egyptians, which is a bit disappointing. Yeah, that's a dead language too, right? Because they speak Arabic there, last I checked. Exactly. It's a dead language, or perhaps you might say it's a, here's a niche bit of jargon for you, it's a sacralized language.

28:57It's not commonly spoken, you will absolutely not hear it on the streets of Egypt, but the final form of the Egyptian language, which we call Coptic, which comes from Egyptos, Coptic, it's a copt, these are Egyptian Christians and they still use it as their language of religion. but they'll use it in, say, a church service, but they won't then turn to each other and speak Coptic. No, they'll probably speak Arabic instead. So it's the Latin of the Middle Eastern Christian, Coptic Christians, I guess? Yeah, the Latin of Egypt, if you like. Although I'm sure Egyptians would call Latin the Coptic of Europe.

29:29That's fine. I'm just trying to give people something because most people are like, I've never heard of this, but I've heard of Coptic Christians, maybe. Yeah, so it's like Chaldean. Do you know Chaldean? Does that ring any bells? It absolutely rings a bell, yes. Most people don't know what this is, but I'm from Michigan, so I know what this is. And correct me if I'm wrong, but they're basically they're Christian Iraqis that for some reason, we just have a ton of them in Michigan. And they tend to run things like gyms and convenience stores and small businesses, very successful, but they have their own language.

29:57I just can't remember if it's only used in church services also, and they speak Arabic. I actually don't know the answer to that now that I think about it. Do you? I do believe that is the case because Arabic is the default language or the lingua franca of Iraq, Maybe not in the northern regions where you get Kurdish, but yeah, sure. I think it has retreated. It's been sacralized again. Sacralized, yes. Okay, so a picture that comes from the word sacrament or something similar root of the word sacrament, I assume. Absolutely. So I want to go back to the symbols having, being like an object, but really we're using them for the sounds of the name of that object.

30:30Is it an example of this? I'm trying to wrap my head around this. a picture of an ox stops meaning ox and starts meaning ah or something like that because you're just showing an ox. It doesn't mean there's an ox there. It just means I want the ah sound in whatever language. So I draw an ox on the wall. That is the beginning of the alphabet. That's the way it all gets started, to be honest. It's all about taking symbols and assigning them to sounds in a way that just wasn't done before. To be clear, this is part of hieroglyphs. I did mention already that a hieroglyph could stand for one sound, two sound, three sound, specifically a consonant sound.

31:05This, I appreciate, there's a little bit of unlearning you have to do. I'm talking about phonetics, the production of sounds. You can have consonant sounds and vowel sounds, and these are the basis for consonant and vowel letters. Vowel sounds, uninterrupted airstream, very loud sounds, R, E, O. Consonant sounds tend to be quieter. They're restricting or impeding the airflow in more ways, like P and T, stopping the airflow. And to begin with, in Egyptian writing and also in the early alphabet, it's all consonants. It was all about allocating a single consonant to a particular symbol in this new system.

31:42For various reasons, one reason being that you could just do without the vowel symbols. So you just didn't need them. You knew what the words were from speech. Maybe your language actually had quite few vowel sounds and you could just do without them. This is the case of Egyptian writing. It's absolutely true of the alphabet's original inventors. And these are people, again, their identity is fairly mysterious, but we can know it linguistically, at least, who they were. It's a group of people speaking a Semitic dialect. People may know Semitic, the word, obviously a negative term, anti-Semitic, but it also is used in Semitic to refer to a group of languages.

32:21It includes Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, great languages like those. and there's clearly way way back long before arabic and hebrew were fully a thing there's a kind of dialect of semitic being spoken in ancient egypt and these are the people who get our alphabet up and running they are clearly embedded into egyptian society they are clearly getting along just fine as a population of immigrants but nonetheless in terms of writing they want their own system and they take existing egyptian symbols hieroglyphs that already exist in the medium of writing, but radically overhaul them, taking about 30 and pairing them up with a single consonant of their spoken language.

33:03So you give the example of the ox's head, the word for ox in their language starts with like a glottal stop in your larynx, it's an alp, that's the word, and now a picture of an alp is standing for the sound, and an alp, this all may sound very strange, this may sound like ancient and irrelevant prehistory, but you already know this word because this becomes the name of the new letter for that sound. They called it alp. The ancient Greeks, they received this letter, they call it something like alpa. Later Greek, alpha. It's still there in alphabet. You know this ancient Semitic word for an ox and also a house, alphabet.

33:40It's a house. And when you have that radical redesign of hieroglyphs, one symbol for one Semitic consonant, hey, Presto, we have an alphabet. Yeah, I noticed that the alphabet in Hebrew is called the Alephbet, and I meant to ask you about that because that's clearly not a coincidence. It just means AB in Hebrew. It would be as strange as us calling our alphabet AB, or we might call it ABCD for longer. As you may know as well, in the Sleritic world, you have the Azbuka. Azbuka, two words, two names put together, alphabet. bit. Yeah, I forgot about that one, actually. And it's interesting that the you mentioned before, you have this picture of the whole ox, or you have the whole cat, or you have the whole, I don't know, man, you have to get rid of the complexity of those.

34:29Otherwise, it's going to be so tedious and cumbersome to use. Hebrew has a little bit of that too, right? Because if you write Hebrew really well, you don't have to use the little dots that go over all of the characters and that go in and under them, because you already know that it says bavakasha, which means please or something like that, right? You already know that. But if you don't know that and you're just learning it, you're in your class in Israel or in your Hebrew school, Sunday school, whatever. Without the dots, you're just looking at this word that you basically have to know what it is.

34:56It's like Chinese, where you just, you have this symbol. And if you don't know what it is, you can't pronounce it or say it. I assume Egyptian was the same way. Oh, crap. I've got man, ox, cat, onk. I forget how you say that. And if you don't know the word, you're just out of luck. Yeah, it's hard. And I've heard these kind of additional systems like the dots, the Hebrew Nikud, I've heard them lovingly referred to as the stabilizers or the training wheels of the script. And the thing is, when you have a script, a writing system, there are many in the world, but many belong to this family tree that our own alphabet belongs to as well.

35:29Many of them don't encode all the sounds of the spoken word. They just don't. The sounds are missing, such as the vowels. And this system is absolutely viable. It completely works, but it relies on the writer and reader knowing a lot of the spoken words already. When you're born into this language, if you're an infamous and you're hearing a lot of Hebrew, you're hearing a lot of Arabic, you've got a massive heads up over, let's say, take myself, 20-something-year-old native English speaker coming to Hebrew and Arabic afresh. I haven't heard that many words. It's going to be hard. Yeah, it's a huge pain.

36:03It almost sounds like the alphabet is a compression technology. Since this is already a nerdy episode, I'm going to lean into it. the alphabet is it's like an mp3 file of writing this less rich you lose some stuff but some of the stuff you arguably can't really hear unless you're listening to high fidelity but it's so much easier to learn and reproduce and distribute and put on the internet and move it around and carry it in a little pocket device look yes the ox looks nicer the onk looks nicer when it's got the colors in it the bird and the guy this looks great i can't be fussing with that i gotta put on a hundred egg crates tomorrow.

36:37So what is the easiest, most basic version where this is still legible? That seems like what the alphabet is. I love that. Exactly. You're putting yourself directly into the heads of the people who are taking the parcel and passing it on. Let's kind of give the alphabet a birth date, 1900 BC-ish, and Egypt as its birthplace. And in the subsequent centuries, as the alphabet is leaving Egypt and being adopted by more and more people in what we know as the Middle East, and eventually will make its way to Greece, we see exactly what you describe. In a few centuries, the symbols lose their complexity.

37:16The letter O, to begin with, is an eye. It's a pictographic human eye. And it has like eyelashes, and it has the edges of the iris, and has a pupil in the middle as well, because it stands for the first sound of the Semitic word for the I, which is the word is ein. It begins with a sound that I can't replicate very well. It kind of hain. Oh, that's like Arabic. I think ayun is I, right? It's Arabic, yeah. It's still there to this day. And this is the joy of the alphabetic history. You just meet words which are just regular Arabic and Hebrew words to this day. But very quickly, we see that simplification taking place.

37:54If we wind the clock forward to, let's say, the year 1000 BC, and we reach kind of landmark people in the history of the alphabet, who are the Phoenicians, based in Lebanon, very impressive ancient civilization, their version of this system, still the same system, they've made not many modifications to it, but clearly, within the space of around 900 years, this is an alphabet as we would recognize it. The letters are abstract. They're brief to write. The old ox's head that will become our A has by this point in time just become three lines. It's very quick to write. I love that metaphor of a compression file because that's exactly what it is.

38:34There are so many elements of the alphabet where it's all about maximum communication with minimum effort. It seems like the alphabet wins and travels around the world or parts of the world anyway because it throws away enough information that it's still really useful, but it's way faster. I mean, there's a reason that hieroglyphics exist in Egypt and we don't see them in Germany, even in Greece. It's like, man, look, if we're going to tote this stuff around the world with merchant trade, which is why I assume it went to Greece and then spread out from there, we can't spend all of our time coloring in birds and whatnot.

39:12No, exactly. Which may, emphasis on the may, explain its success as a script and its longevity as well, where it's triumphed and taken the place of other ancient writing systems. Massive proviso on that, some of the writing systems it replaced are very impressive and clearly were very successful in their day and age, but ultimately have given way to this new family tree of writing that comes from that single source in Egypt. The big one, hieroglyphs. Hieroglyphs have basically faded away. They've now been replaced by the Arabic script, which is a member of this family tree, a distant cousin of the Latin script, but also, say, cuneiform.

39:53People who love the ancient world may be familiar with cuneiform. It's like wedges pressed into clay. Very sophisticated script. My son asked me about this because he's like, what was the first writing? And I had to look it up. I was like, I think it's Sumer or something, but I forget what it was called. And yeah, I think we called it cuneiform, but you're right, cuneiform sounds very fancy. And yeah, Yeah, it was like these little half moons of clay that they placed and pressed into things, right? Exactly. Yeah. It's this alternative writing system. It has its origins in what is today Iraq. And it is super successful.

40:27I really need to stress that. But I think its success and its utility for people back then over thousands of years, well actually more hundreds of years i think of 2000 it's dependent on experts on a widespread group of people who know this system who are very adept at this system they're professional they're probably paid to be the local scribe you have a message for your brother or your sister in a faraway land you go to your local scribe you tell him probably him the message he writes it down it get sent off to a fellow scribe who can decipher it and relay the message. And if you have some sort of upset in your local kingdom and the scribal class is not being replenished, if this is becoming archaic, non-self-replicating knowledge, then your writing system is going to suffer.

41:20Whereas our alphabet, what we call phonemic, it's based on the sounds of your language, which arguably everybody has much better access to, I would put money on it doing much better. And so far, history has borne that out. AI may eventually translate everyone's personal spelling and dialect automatically. At last, humanity will communicate perfectly through software owned by three companies and trained on Reddit. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Factor. The question, what are we having for dinner? It sounds minor until you had to answer it every day for years. And it's not just dinner.

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44:28So if you're signing up, please use the code Jordan. It's a win-win. You get the discount and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you for your support. Now back to Danny Bate. I'm learning Chinese, right? And so I was curious how they came up with some of these characters and there's traditional Chinese, just super complicated graphics writing. And then there's simplified Chinese were basically Mao and the communists were like, hey, man, we want a bunch of farmers to learn. We need tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people to learn this. We can't be adding all these extra lines in here.

45:00We got to make this as fast as possible. So they simplified it. It's actually quite nice. But the old, really old Chinese that you see on, not even just classical Chinese, but even before that, it's very curvy and it's carved into wood or something like that. Some of those are pictographs, right? So it's like hand and it looks a little bit like a hand drawing at a basic level. You mentioned before that our alphabet has some of that. So the letter A is an ox's head. Did I imagine you saying that? And that's not right. Absolutely. To begin with, it has the same origin. Yeah. Which seems very intuitive that our earliest ways of writing down language actually doesn't necessarily need to involve speech at all.

45:38We just write down the thing that looks like a thing in the world. This very kind of obvious or natural step for us humans to have taken where we depict the thing itself on the wall of our cave or our tomb whatever it happens to be this is a very natural step to have taken it does make it quite hard to talk about when writing actually first started if you're just depicting stuff firstly from our perspective is this communicative or is this artistic what you're doing here do we call There's gorgeous cave paintings from Neolithic France, the ones with the hand paintings and the bison and things like that.

46:17Is this writing? Arguably not, but it's quite hard to say. And it is difficult when we have these ancient writing systems, not just Chinese or very early hieroglyphs, to talk about actually when do we have writing up and running. because very often it's just counting things, it's tallies of objects, it's images of the object itself. Arguably, we experts, using that term loosely, we might prefer to call that proto-writing or pre-writing or something like that. We love throwing around the word proto. It's great. But it's complicated. You guys love that. I'm fully guilty of this. But I just want to say that I do appreciate the mention of Chinese writing.

46:54This entirely separate tradition of writing has no connection to anything that I've mentioned so far. And it is kind of the counter example or the objection to things that I've said. This phonemic system based comes out of Egypt, super important. So many languages are written down by it today. I might make a claim it was always going to be successful because it writes down sounds. But here's Chinese writing where the phonetic component is secondary. It's about meaning and objects and things. So it's a clear counter example. And I would hesitantly connect that to the success of China and to the success of the Chinese state in people buying into this alternative way of writing.

47:35But I'm speculating here. I think it had to be like that because you mentioned the phonetic element. And I'm not an expert here, but you can look at a Chinese character. And if you don't know what it is, you can't sound it out. It's not possible. You can't look at it and go, oh, OK, this is a man symbol and this is a woman symbol. So it must sound like this. That's not how it works at all. In fact, if you take the man symbol and the woman symbol and you put them together, it's the symbol for good. So it just doesn't mean anything. And you can add like a fire to the bottom of something. And sure, if it's cooking or heat, that's obvious.

48:07But you could add water to something and it just it doesn't necessarily mean anything. Sometimes it's just that's what the symbol is. And maybe it did a thousand years ago. Maybe they called this something else and it was like that. But I don't know. So if I'm trying to see an ox head in a modern capital A, it seems like it should be upside down because the horns would be upside down. So the A that we use is actually upside down. Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, by the time, as I said, fast forward a few centuries from when it is clearly an ox's head. And we do have plenty of examples of evidence of this.

48:38But fast forwards of the Phoenicians or the Greeks, people have forgotten this or people. It doesn't matter to them that it was originally a thing, an object in the world. so actually the letters are very fluid and we see this the way that the letters are placed on your instruments of writing whatever it happens to be the way that they're oriented the way that they flow across the page we get right to left to right we even get this glorious direction of writing called booster feedon where writing goes in one direction let's say left to right reaches the end of the line and then immediately drops down rather than going back to where it began it drops down immediately and then goes in the opposite direction wait so you write left right then right to left then left to right then right that is such a pain well why not one thing you save is your pen doesn't need to move as far back you just drop down saving so much time yeah i mean okay fine i don't know but then you have to know to switch directions but then everybody just did i don't know whatever that's weird to me it is yeah it's an alternative way that i suppose we still have some stuff like again in chinese they don't space the words out So you just read a really long Chinese sentence.

49:45And if you don't know what the words are and where they begin and end, it could just be anything. But then again, that's the story with Chinese in general. And then they used to write it up and down, right? Not left or right. I don't know when they changed that, but it was just like, hey, let's make this even more complicated by writing it up and down. But yeah, if you don't know where the words begin and end, because a word might be one symbol, two symbols, three symbols, could even be like five if you're talking about China Airlines. That's maybe four or five symbols or even six. Sure. You just have to know that that's a unit.

50:13That's what it means. Because if you don't, and when I read Chinese with my teacher, sometimes I mistake where the word ends and I'll say something else. And she's like, oh, no, no, no, that word ends there. And it's this. And it's like, oh, yeah, that's really obvious. Now that you mention it, native speaker. So this kind of thing, it just all seems so arbitrary. Now, most writing is left to write, including Chinese, unless you're talking about what, Arabic and Hebrew? Are those the only ones that go the other way? Oh, now you're testing me that there are other ones in the neighborhood. You have something like syriac writing that's going the direction most of the scripts of india go from left to right so that's another one i'm just thinking of the top of my head there's a lot of different writing systems in the world but yeah i think as a planet now we have more or less settled on left to right i appreciate the right to left because i'm left-handed and i was i spent my entire youth with pencil covering my entire hand and forearm so i'm like oh man if i if an arabic or my native language, I just wouldn't have had this problem at all.

51:12There you go. I guess nobody has to worry about that anymore because nobody's writing with a pencil. But man, how much of this origin story is firm evidence and how much is reconstruction and we're just placing a really neat story over something that's not quite as cut and dry? A very fair question. One that I am happy to answer. And it's never a question that I shy away from. In my writing, in my book, for example, I very much invite the reader into this active debate. Great. So my answer to the question would be, it's a pretty solid story based on not much evidence. Yeah. You don't know who invented it.

51:47You don't know what they did. You don't know what their motivations were. And it's like, oh, this is a compelling narrative. Really easy for that to harden into a false certainty because it sounds good and is easy to teach. Of course. Yes. Not that you're doing that, but some people might. No, thank you. I appreciate that. And it could be done. I would say, though, So the people who are really at the coalface of this subject, though, they know full well how this is. It's a story in flux. And it's a matter of the best theory that we've got, but also a matter of the other theories just don't stack up.

52:16So let's say something outlandish. The alphabet came from Mars. That is a theory. It's just not as good as the one that says the alphabet came from ancient Egypt. Because they have a bunch of evidence that shows its slow development. Those poor ancient Egyptians, man. Everybody's like, aliens built the pyramids. Aliens built the alphabet. and they're like guys we are smart too give us some freaking credit here egyptians were extremely smart so yeah i don't buy into any of that those people couldn't have done this nah it's got to be aliens aliens bro exactly i'm doing the hand gesture already it's just aliens aliens man but i would absolutely say that it is kind of in flux it is helped by the fact that yeah okay in the absolute earliest origins of the alphabet where we clearly have the first few generations of alphabetic pioneers, we don't have much.

53:04Our sources are in the decades rather than the hundreds. It's scraps of fragments of things. We have a lot of inscriptions that come from the Sinai Peninsula, where it seems these kind of innovators were working, mining, actually mining for minerals. But as the years go by, our sources expand. So by the time you reach the Phoenicians, the kind of next important leg in the journey, we've got loads of Phoenician writing. And by the time we reach the Greeks, early, let's say, Hebrew writing, early Arabic writing, or let's call it Arabian writing, we've got way more. So it's not as if this is a very thin thread that we're desperately trying to kind of knot up and secure.

53:43But I'll give you a great example of this. I will admit, writing about the absolute earliest history of the alphabet, which I did in chapter A, not chapter one, but chapter A of my book, was daunting. It's a big field, no one can agree on anything and i have to make this accurate true and accessible and entertaining to my reader because i write for a general audience and i really struggle and sweat over getting everything right i send it off to an expert friend of mine who says this is good this is good to go and i kid you not two weeks later i get one of those google alerts that says something like a scientific magazine that says find that upsets early alphabetic history discovered in syria and it's an absolute gut punch i'm gonna running home like i just turned in my manuscript come on exactly basically can't stop press everything's wrong it was bothers to me because it mattered to me enormously that the right information needed to be correct i am pleased very pleased purely because of the horse i have in this race that it did not turn out to be such a stick of dynamite in the end as the author of a book yes it was a gut punch it was very concerning that i might have said something wrong.

54:51But I will say as a scholar, as somebody who just loves this, let's say the alphabet turns out to have been designed in Syria rather than Egypt. Great. That's just great. That's brilliant. That's the story in flux. It's funny. You should try being a podcaster. Apparently, none of us care if anything we say is accurate. According to my inbox, we just don't try at all. I'd like to think we're a little different, but I can't speak for all podcasters. You know, it's funny. I was thinking of something. You mentioned the Greeks. When you say something was invented in China, you think, wow, was it it 2 ,000 years ago?

55:21Is it ancient? Is it modern? Is it a drone? When you say something was invented in Greece, you know it's ancient Greece. Nobody thinks you mean something was invented in Greece in 2008. Sorry, Greeks, your food is amazing. Your people are lovely. The country is beautiful. But yeah, nobody is talking about things invented in Greece and they mean anything that's less than 2 ,000 years old or so. I just noticed that as you were talking. I should probably change the subject. I'm just getting myself in trouble. No comment. I love the Greeks. I love Greece. They're passionate people. Why wouldn't they be?

55:52And I'm going to leave it at that. Yeah, exactly. It just, it seems like every alphabet begins its life as this weird, badly fitted hand-me-down. And it just changes as it goes. I want to talk about some specific letters because I know, I don't know, we have unlimited time here, but I've got all kinds of questions about why things are the way they are. like W, for example. Okay. What the heck? Germanic names and words. When you say W in German, it's V. Okay. And, but we already have V in English, but in German, the V is F. But you also have F. Anyway, now I'm just complaining about German, but is it W?

56:35Because it looks like double V. And in German, it's called double V, by the way, which is strange because it's not actually called V in German. The whole thing is annoyingly confusing, but I don't really understand why English calls W W U, even though it actually resembles two V's, and in German that's what they call it, double V. What's going on here? What's going on here is the natural flow of language and history, which is a wishy-washy answer. You better do better than that. All right. I promise I will. But what I mean by that is, I think, interesting and perhaps also comforting rule in the study of language is that when you go further back in time, things that are more separate today look more similar.

57:17So as a general rule, let's go wind back the clock to the earliest period of the German language, as the period we know as Old High German, looks a lot like English or Old English at the time. The words are much closer to each other in the two languages, and they're using fundamentally the same letters as one another because they've just got these letters from the Romans. They've taken them, usually along with the package deal of Christianity and Latin in church and said, thanks very much. So what's basically happened, like a kind of river or like a river delta spreading out and flowing out, things divide, things multiply, and things get more complicated over time.

57:53And sounds, which are caught up in the alphabet, or arguably letters and are caught up in sounds, sounds change. Sounds very naturally change in a way that could happen in one spoken language but doesn't happen in another spoken language and then naturally diverge. From this we get accents, originally, initially, then we get dialects, and then eventually we get full-blown languages. And this is a very natural process. So let's take your concerns about the German language. I get it. I hear you. Because, understandably, you're taking the German language as it is today. But if we are to wind back the clock, we've got all sorts of evidence that allow us to say that a W is once a W.

58:34It's a W to begin with. It's a W, U, because that is a sound of their language, and they need a letter for it. Latin has given them a kind of V letter, it's a V, that they can use for V, and a W they can use for W. But then there's two sounds behind those two letters, then go and change, as keeps happening over and over again. The W becomes a V sound, W to V, very common sound change. It happened in the history of Latin, it happened in the history of German as well, it just hasn't happened in the history of English. And the V sound, the V, then becomes a F, just as the S becomes a Z sound in German.

59:12You say Z rather than C. So very natural sound changes going on behind an alphabet and letters that aren't being updated, that can just stand still through all of this. It's happening in German, but it's not happening in its cousin English. Hence, you get two languages that increasingly look quite different. That's a lot of information, a lot of concepts, but the takeaway points are letters don't often change, sounds really do. Yeah, but what you're telling me at this point, the English alphabet, it reminds me, I have a drawer in my kitchen that has an iPhone charger. It's got a USB-C, there's a USB-C to USB-A cable, there's a micro USB to USB-A cable.

59:52It's got all these chargers for my random Chinese toys and my kids get AC adapters. That's the English alphabet to me. It's this drawer in my kitchen where once a year I go through it and I go, do we even own the thing that this goes to? Can we replace this with the USB-C? Does this even plug in and then go to the other thing? And why does it have two plastic connectors? That's what I'm dealing with in my kitchen. And that's what this alphabet now looks like to me. It's a junk drawer that you just go, why is this like that? If you want to know, I got half an hour and I'll tell you, but otherwise, just accept it.

1:00:25Just use it until it falls apart. That's what we're dealing with. Jordan, you have a gift for metaphors, I have to say. That's absolutely glorious. And I would hope that in that drawer as well, at least in mine, there's money, money that's not in circulation anymore. Like I have a bag of Croatian kuna, which is useless now because they took the euro. I would argue that maybe our alphabet is not just the wires, but it's also the coins for old money of things that are just precious that we can't bear to get rid of. I cannot stress this enough. We are much more okay for the sounds of our speech to change with some grumbles, grumbles about young people not talking properly and things like that, or accents sounding old fashioned among the elderly and things like that.

1:01:07But we are much happier and much more blasé about sounds changing than we are letters. It makes sense, right? Because you got the printing press. So that's got to be like standardized. You got to standardize spellings and stuff like that, at least across countries in some ways. Now you've got color with a U in it that you guys use. I kind of like that. You had a little bit of British, Canadian, American stuff going on here, but the speech continues changing and then it just maybe doesn't even make sense. You'd look at acts. I did a show about accents and it's like, where's the R in all this British stuff?

1:01:38And it's like, they dropped it because it was posh. And then the Americans kept it. And here we are with this weird sounding R difference that we've got here. The, I forget what they call it, the hidden R or something like that, or the dark R. So we often say, and when I'm teaching my kids, especially English spelling makes no sense. You just have to accept it. But it seems more accurate that it made sense at several different moments in time. And if you take a snapshot of the language, then it totally made sense why we spelled this thing that way. We just kept all of them again in this giant junk drawer in the kitchen that is our alphabet.

1:02:11And that's why my kid's like, why is there an E on the end of this? And I'm like, I don't know, but there is. And if you don't use it, you spelled it wrong. Sorry, bro. That's what he's going through right now. Poor guy. I do get it. I understand. I do sympathize, but I absolutely love your kind of your twist there, the change of the different way of looking at the alphabet. I have to admit, as somebody who thinks about this, who loves the alphabet as this ancient piece of technology, it really does break my heart when people say it makes no sense. It makes loads of sense. The problem is it makes too much sense in all sorts of competing ways.

1:02:44There are too many rules in competition with one another. There could be historical rules, there could be current rules, there could be things that haven't been tidied up, where they're in competition for the same kind of sound job, in spelling the same sound. And that will altogether look like anarchy, but it's not. It's the junctural. All of these cables made sense on their own once upon a time. And we have just not taken that step. We've not tidied it up. I love that you mentioned the printing press there. Printing press takes off in Europe in the 15th century, arrives in Britain, meets the English language around about the year, what is that, 1415, Mr.

1:03:21William Caxton in London. and English spelling is basically what he printed. It's 15th century English of London and it really worked. He printed according to how he spoke, that ancient principle, you should write how you speak. And the thing is speech has just drifted and drifted. Letters have fallen silent because the sounds have disappeared like your silent K at the beginning of knee or your G-H in light and bright and things like that. They were all once pronounced. They were for Caxton, so they're in his system. So you used to say, ouch, my knie. Yeah. Really? That's hilarious somehow. Remember my rule about going back in time and language is seeming a bit more similar.

1:04:00If you put silent K back into these words, they sound like German and Dutch. They do, yeah. Licht and knie, meine Kniean. But I would say, here's the big thing. Your lovely listeners might say, okay, this British guy is defending the alphabet. Nonetheless, we've got all these competing rules. Why are they all in competition? He hasn't explained why. this then gets to the heart of something then specific to English and English speakers, unlike other countries, maybe smaller countries or smaller languages with fewer speakers or just whatever reason, English does not have the central bodies that could tidy the spelling up, very undemocratically decide.

1:04:41W is called W, shaped like two V's and descended from people desperately improvising a symbol English didn't even have. So basically, W is the cyber truck of letters. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you in part by Lufthansa. When people talk about travel, they usually focus on the destination, the hotel, the restaurants, all the stuff that happens after you land. But the flight is part of the experience too. Just like a great hotel can shape an entire trip, so can a great flight. That's exactly what Lufthansa Allegris is built around. On a long haul route, comfort matters more than people realize.

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1:06:42Check out our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. It is specific and practical. It'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, psychology, relationships in under two minutes just about every Wednesday. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Danny Bate. German has this. They make this thing called a Duden, which is like a grammar book. And I remember when I lived there in the late 90s, everyone knew this. It was like, by the way, starting next year, if you've got a word, if you put those two, because you combine words in German, so like Schiff is S-C-H-I-F-F, Fott means like voyage, F-A-H-R-T, but if you got a Schiff Fott, you used to drop one of the Fs.

1:07:25They were like, we're not doing that anymore. You're just going to write three Fs in a row. And I think they still do that. I don't know why they would have changed it back, but they could do that. They could be like, this is German now. And everyone's like, all right, fine. But yeah, you don't have that with English. You don't have, I don't know, the queen or something being like, hey, Indians and Americans, listen up. You got to put a U in the word color or you're in trouble. You're going to hear about it from me. Nobody can do that with us. There's two ingredients missing that together produce the situation.

1:07:52Not only do we not have that particular body, that definitive thing, even if we did, people have to listen to them. People have to agree. Because of general German-ness, people in Germany to this day buy into the Duden and they buy into its updates and say, yeah, great, we'll go along with this. Where I live, for example, which is the Czech Republic, same system. We have exactly the same system. There is an institution and its updates are more or less listened to, taken as gospel. It works. You could say it's efficient. It roughly keeps on top of changing sounds. It is also quite undemocratic.

1:08:26Who gave these guys power? The English situation is not awful, but what it is is different. If you are going to update spelling, let's say you're going to reform english spelling and tidy up all of these competing principles get rid of all these silent letters it's going to look weird whatever the result is because it would be a major update i think the alphabet would look very strange but you have to satisfactorily answer two big questions firstly who are you who gives you the right and secondly do you have the power for then people to listen to you yeah good luck telling americans you thought we made a big deal about no taxation without representation.

1:09:02Holy smokes, you're going to get us to put a U in the word color? You better be well-armed, sir. Yeah, that's exactly. That is never happening. It'd be 1776 and all over again. And I wouldn't blame you. I would not blame you if people were in upper arms about this. Let's flip the script. Let's say it's an American standard spelling. Why wouldn't it be American, the most prestigious form of English today? It's the most dominant. Just have to get all Americans to agree on something. How hard can it be? Of course. Yes, with due deference to the Bostonians as well, and whether they agree with putting the R's in and stuff like that.

1:09:35OK, let's say you do that. You've got good reasons for doing it. You will annoy the rest of the English speaking, writing and reading world. Yeah, we're joking, but it's literally it just sounds impossible. Right. Oh, yeah. Get New York, Boston, Texas, California and everybody in between to agree on something. Tell Canada to get on board and then somebody notify the English and the Indians and every other place that speaks English as one of their major languages. that they now have to do this. Good luck with that. Ludicrous to even think about something like that ever happening in the 21st century.

1:10:07And if I may, and I hope people won't think I'm overreaching here, but this is the ultimate irony. If we're pursuing this thought experiment, we have this big committee of people from all the different English-speaking countries. The list grows longer by the day. A lot of English where I live, in Prague, for example, increasingly, so it's getting bigger and bigger. But let's say we have our committee and everybody's on board and people are going to listen to them. This is the ultimate irony. The debates will go on. I honestly think the debates will push this writing system back in time. People are accepting more archaisms because it's a way of unifying the different dialects.

1:10:43Some dialects pronounce this letter, others pronounce this letter, so let's take it back in time. I think ultimately this hypothetical committee will keep searching for common ground, a kind of form of writing that we could all agree on, and we'll end up where we started. it will end up with 15th century written English because it is with some but not many exceptions. It's the kind of departure point for all the different kinds of English that we have today. We may end up agreeing. I guess we're stuck with this kind of common denominator for all English today. I think you're giving us way too much credit and we're going to end up speaking entirely in emojis.

1:11:20And then you're going to be like, aha, hieroglyphics all over again. and you're going to have to etch a person shrugging and giving themselves a manicure or whatever that one is on the top of your paper. I want to hear about this alleged monkey in the letter Q. What's that all about? That sounds hokey. Oh, I'm so pleased. I do appreciate the opportunity to talk about that. Yeah, I've got to take it right back to the beginning. So as I mentioned, our letters look like things when the alphabet gets up and running, and some are body parts, some are household objects, Some are members of the animal kingdom.

1:11:54And the letter Q is with due provisos about what exactly specific hieroglyphic prototype inspired the letter, because some of our earliest versions are a little sketchy, a little hard to read. I think it is pretty certain, based on the way that the image looks and also the name of the letter cop, that basically the letter Q started out as a kind of hieroglyphic monkey or baboon. And the capital letter Q has its tail to this day, which I love. Why would we need a monkey pictograph? Because if the alphabet was invented, there's no monkeys in the Middle East, are there? Sure. Yeah. There were monkeys in Egypt, at least.

1:12:37I did not know that. Different species, perhaps not the monkeys that may immediately come to mind, certainly not orangutans or anything like that, but yeah, primates, basically. Huh. It's just cute thinking about the letter Q being a monkey, but also we barely use that letter. Is it one of the least used letters? It feels like it is, anyways. Yeah, it's Q and X, hence the high scrabble score. Yes, good point. I didn't think about X. Whenever you see X in a child's book, it's always xylophone, because that's the only example that you can come by. Xylophone and X-ray, And then it's like, we're kind of out of ideas here.

1:13:09Actually, weirdly, you are out of innocent ideas. Then you get into the dodgy words. And I will give all full credit to the brilliant Irish comedian Dara O 'Brien. He has a great stand-up routine on this. My favorite stand-up comedian. Basically, that's it for the safe ideas. Very quickly, the third word he puts us out to the audience, shout back, xenophobia. Oh, yeah. Not great for a children's picture book. That's true. Are there other ones? I can't even, because I'm coming up super dry on xylitol, which is like a sugar, I think, that goes in some kinds of gum. I mean, I really can't think of things that aren't chemicals.

1:13:43Xerox. Xerox. Xerox, but then you're into copyright areas as well. Yeah. That's a whole other chapter, but the few words that we do have that start with an X. With the exception of the name Xavier, with an X, that's actually Spanish. It's just Javier, spelled differently, before the Spanish decided, no, it's going to be a J. So again, see how you have these institutions that are able to rule on these things. But basically everything else is from Greek, the X initial words. So if you're dictator of English for the next 60 seconds, what are you going to change? What couple of things are you like, OK, we're not using this any.

1:14:20Are you getting rid of a letter? Are you getting rid of the C and the K kind of problem that we have here or that kids have? Are we adding use, removing use, ease? What's going on? Wow. I think, frankly, as I hope I've got across, the first thing I'm doing is resigning immediately because this task is massive. I really have written the book on this subject, or a book on this subject, and I am daunted by the whole prospect of reform. I remain firmly on the fence, but okay, I'm speculating here. Do you know what? Day one, I'm getting rid of Q. Wow, and even in your title, you're getting rid of your title letter.

1:14:53Yep. My book goes from why Q needs you to why Q needed you, which is not too bad, but we could spell it with C or K. In fact, old English writers, that's not Shakespeare, that's like Beowulf times pre the year 1100 AD. They didn't use it. They didn't use Q. They used C. So could we. That's a really good point. I hadn't thought about that. What letter do you think has the best origin story? Q's pretty good, right? A little monkey in the ox head is cool. What else is there where you're like, wow, this is pretty badass? as far as letters are concerned. Oh, that's nice. I have a real soft spot for Alec W.

1:15:32I like that it is invented as a kind of response to the fall of Rome, putting it quite grandly. But what I'm getting at is that the so-called formal fall of Rome, where everything sort of disintegrates in Western Europe, it has these so-called barbarians, and these barbarians speak Germanic languages. And eventually their languages and their names have the sound w and the Latin alphabet is not equipped to spell this sound at this time, so the letter w slowly emerges. And I like that. It's a product of a specific time. Far earlier than that, I like r. R, if people know they're Greek, it's a rho.

1:16:09And the difference between Greek rho, which is the ancestor of capital R, there's a key difference, which is that rho in Greek is missing that little leg. It's missing the additional kind of forward-facing leg. And that makes Greek rho look like our P, rather confusingly. But basically, the leg is an addition to the letter when the alphabet lands in the hands of the Romans, prior to which there is no leg. It looks like a rho, and it's closer to what it originally was, which is a head. It's a man's head. And it would have been called something, maybe it's hard to reconstruct the exact pronunciation but something like raash or raas meaning head and if people know hebrew where you have rosh that is still the word for head to this day so letter r comes from a head it's named that because the first letter or the first sound of the word for head is a r and the word for head is something like raash which is what it still is in hebrew so echoes of really ancient history in a language like Hebrew to this day.

1:17:15Yeah, it's crazy how much this stuff carries through history. I just never thought each letter had a history book behind it. It just really is kind of amazing. And again, deep geek stuff, which is what the show is about, at least today. I wonder what you think the English alphabet will look like in a thousand years. I know we talked about maybe it won't exist or something like that, but maybe you have some ideas. What do you think? I love this kind of speculation. I intend to be around for a little of it to see whether it comes true in the end. Part of the next thousand years? Yeah, I mean, technically you will be.

1:17:47Linguistics is so interesting, I don't think I ever would get bored. But nonetheless, I think in the near future, I will say that standard English is here to stay for, OK, I'll put a number on it. I won't put any money on it, but I will give it a number the next hundred years. I really think that through its prestige, through our familiarity with it, through, of course, the technology that upholds this spelling system like spell checker, predictive text, AI, every time you type something out incorrectly, quote unquote incorrectly in your phone and your phone changes it to the approved spelling, you are maintaining this out of date 15th century spelling system.

1:18:31And I think that so many factors are propping it up, not least geopolitics. English language countries are very powerful, the US, of course, being the obvious one. And it would, I would say that beyond 100 years, it would take a serious shift to knock standard English and our version of the alphabet off its perch and to turn it into something new, to allow the floodgates to open and for people to embrace something new, something reformed, something very different. a thousand years though i want to speculate because the circumstances of the alphabet are entirely bound up in the circumstances of the present day our day being no exception a hundred years from now is maybe guessable a thousand years not at all what i can say at least it would be unrecognizable that's what i'd say it'd be something completely different the next time somebody opens a book sends a text or looks at a keyboard what is the one thing you want them to notice that before this show they probably never would have seen before.

1:19:37Yes. Oh, what a lovely question. I really do appreciate that because I never want to have the final word on these things. I actually want to have somebody's first word rather than final word as they open their eyes to these things. And I would suppose it would be how different in many ways speech is from spelling. How the two diverge just as a general principle. I mean nothing by that. I don't mean to sort of rock people's world and let people fall into some deep abyss of arbitrary language and linguistics. Rather, just appreciate that we have this extremely ancient writing system that is really being pulled apart in so many directions.

1:20:17It's being pulled apart by the different ways that a country can speak, different ways a region or a family or even an individual can speak. I don't speak the same in every single situation or social context. In relaxed speech, I use a lot more glottal T's in British English, saying something like it rather than it. But in talking to you, Jordan, I use, of course, my best. Oh, yeah, good. The most pretentious version of your accent. I appreciate that. Of course. I save this only for interviews with American stars. But nonetheless, there is so much speech, a cacophony of speech, of different sounds, hiding behind our alphabet.

1:20:56And we just muddle the two up in so many different ways that I think maybe, and here maybe I am reaching a bit, I would hope it makes people a bit more sympathetic to other people's ways of speaking, to how the youth speak and how different regions speak, whether you're from the north, from the south, from east coast, west coast, whether you're from Boston. Because the alphabet doesn't work especially well for anybody. Our speech is so divergent from that kind of standard spelling that it doesn't work well, particularly well for any one accent. So we can kind of work well for us all in a very democratic and clunky kind of way.

1:21:33And I hope people will bear that in mind when they're reading and also listening to their fellow English speakers. Danny Bate, thank you so much. Thank you for nerding out with me. This is right on the edge for me of like, okay, is this too geeky for the show? I don't know. I'm doing it. We'll see. I guess we'll find out when the listeners write in and go, you lost me halfway through. Who cares about Q? Nah, we'll see. We'll see. I've got a pretty funny audience. I think that a lot of people really like this. I really enjoyed this. I just find this stuff to be so nerd-tastic and I can't get enough of it.

1:22:05So thank you for coming on the show and scratching that itch. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for everything that you brought to the conversation too. Really, really enjoyed this. And thanks to your team as well for what they will do. An AI chatbot will listen without judgment, agree without hesitation, and stay with you all night. But for some users, that comforting loop has ended in obsession, delusion, and tragedy. Tell me, how do you use ChatGPT? And how often do you use it? These chatbots have very serious psychological effects on their users. Men tend to have STEM delusions.

1:22:39They believe that they've invented something like a mathematical theory or solved climate change. And women tend to have spiritual delusions. They believe that they have met an entity through this or that spirits are real. There's these really extreme cases. Suicide is extreme. These kind of mental breakdowns are extreme, like believing the spirits are real or that you live in the matrix. I've now written about two people who have died after getting really addicted, involved with AI chatbots. OpenAI has built safeguards into these products, like there's certain things they're not supposed to do.

1:23:16But what we have discovered is that in a long conversation, when you're talking to it for a really long time, the kind of wheels come off of these chatbots and they start doing really unpredictable things. These companies can't actually control what it says. It's just word associating to you. And sometimes that is really messing with people's brains. I think that we need to be a lot more skeptical of what's coming out of these chatbots. And people need to understand they're not oracles. They're not telling you superhuman intelligent thoughts. They are word prediction machines and are really good at that.

1:23:53Please don't trust them too much. They'll betray you. To hear more about how easily the spiral of AI psychosis can begin, check out episode 1227 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. The alphabet wasn't designed. It survived. It crossed borders, outlived empires, absorbed invasions, and accumulated thousands of years of patches from people who were just trying to make the damn thing work, which is probably why it tells us so much about humanity. Civilization is not built from perfect systems. It's built from flawed systems that generations of strangers reluctantly agree not to replace. And somewhere inside every capital A, there's still an ox staring back at us.

1:24:32All things Danny Bate will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at jordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And the show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Tata Sadlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting.

1:25:05In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in these sort of peak nerd linguistics episodes, accents, the alphabet, languages, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

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