Is You Being Served? (Linguistics)

[Ishmael]

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

Curiously I am writing a piece for the Megalithic book which suggests that alphabets and England are not necessarily as far apart as everybody thinks. I'll post it up sequentially in bite-sized crispy codpieces.

[Mick Harper]

Thus, if you do not wish to move up the Michael Line but wish to get to a source of tin then the Hermit can tell you the way. But here is an interesting point: since you have arrived from abroad and speak God-knows-what-language, how is the Hermit going to communicate with you. It is true that he can probably guide you rather broadly using signs and perhaps the universal language of leather compasses but then, how did you tell him you wanted a tin mine? Yes, yes, you're an experienced trader and can say 'Where's the tin' in twelve languages but a much more exciting method of intercourse is in prospect.

Invention of Alphabets Part I

One of the great unaddressed mysteries of history concerns the emergence of alphabets.in the second millennium BC. The mystery is why historians (and for that matter linguists) pay so little attention to it. According to them, it's just one of those things that happen. So very natural, even inevitable. Except that it isn't.

[Mick Harper]

Invention of Alphabets Part II

The basic problem lies in the fact that you cannot alphabetise languages. Yes, I know you think you are reading an alphabetised language but hold fast while the actual difficulties are itemised. For instance, let us alphabetise that last phrase: actual difficulties are itemised. But this time, forget your alphabet, forget you can alphabetise languages, and decide just what you'll need for those four words were you sitting down to alphabetise English for the very first time: that first a in 'actual'--easy isn't it? It's a-for-apple. No, it isn't. It's a different a-sound. Not very different, the International Phonetic Alphabet makes no distinction, and English-speakers used to literacy have been eliding the two sounds for hundreds of years but still apple and actual are two different a-sounds.

It probably isn't going too far to say that every a-sound in English is unique or probably was originally unique, or at the very least there was one hell of a lot of them. Now go on to the first consonant in 'actual'. Try sounding 'actual' by using a c+t as our present alphabet urges you to do....that's right, you will sound like a fifties actress (no pun intended) reading from a script. That is no accident (no further pun intended) because, in a sense, everybody who reads English becomes an unconscious actor when speaking English. We have the word in our head, and the word on the page.

So if c+t doesn't do it, and no other combination of the existing letters will achieve fidelity, you will have to make up a new letter that means the first consonant of the word actual. So now we have twenty-seven letters in the English alphabet. That deals with the first consonant in the word 'actual' which was the very first one we came across...oh yes, and then there's the a as well...we never finished that. Would it be OK if we just put a circle over the a or perhaps an accent? As you can see, we are going to have an alphabet of...well....nobody knows but it will certainly run into thousands of letters.

[Leon]

[Mick Harper]

Invention of Alphabets Part III

With this background firmly in mind we can now return to the those most ancient of days, the time back in the fourth millenium when writing down speech began. Since there was no way of rendering an infinite number of sounds qua sounds, the rather obvious decision was made to render every word as a separate sign. Actually it was found in practice that you could get away with but a few thousand of these signs--pictograms, ideograms--but anyway the method worked admirably, lasted for a very long time (still does in Chinese of course) and wandered very far across the earth's surface.

The principle was broken by only one, very tiny, situation that could not be met by this otherwise robust system. How did you render people's names? Did you have to invent an identikit ideogram every time? No, as some bright spark pointed out, all you had to do was treat these people's names phonetically and then simply choose common words that began with these letters, string them together and indicate what you were doing by, say, putting a cartouche round the whole thing. Problem solved.

[Ishmael]

[Mick Harper]

No, because unless you knew the name anyway you would not be able to render the name accurately (and people do like you to get their names right). As you know this principle of "near enough" was used later on for ordinary words but that was because with ordinary words you had the sound in your head already so could guess the spelled-word, but in the case of people's names this is not possible.

Of course some people's names can be rendered by common words but how would the reader know whether he was supposed to be reading the words or the initial phonetic sounds of the words? But this does lead to a thought: the Parsees of India always use job-titles for surnames eg Indian cricketer Roy Engineer, and Parsee = Persian = Sanskrit-speakers, so maybe they made sure their names could be written in the way you suggest.

[Ishmael]

[Leon]

[Ishtar]

[Chad]

[Mick Harper]

Leon makes the usual mistake of supposing the past is a foreign country. Hermits, servants of Hermes, are just like any other employees of trading companies. Mainly helpful. It's kind of a condition of employment.

[Mick Harper]