Renaming the Alphabet
When did alpha, beta, gamma and delta become a, bee, cee and dee?
Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν …
A glimpse at the Greek alphabet grasps its similarity to the Roman letters your eyes are now reading. There are differences, of course, but we have an A, a B, an E, an I and a K, and most of the characters in between are not too far-removed from Roman counterparts.
There is one big reason behind all these similarities: the Greek alphabet (specifically, an ancient form of it) was a forefather of the Roman one, adapted for the Latin language, and for centuries used for English too.
One major difference, which you can’t tell from the sight of the letters’ shapes, is in their names. It’s well known that the Greek alphabet comes with distinct labels: alpha, beta (more like ‘veta’ in modern pronunciation), gamma, delta, epsilon and so on. These names are ancient, just as old as the symbolic shapes they refer to.
Yet, if the Greek alphabet is ancestral to our own, what happened to its integral naming system? In other words, why and when did the Greek names alpha, beta, gamma, delta, etc. turn into our own beloved a, bee, cee, dee and the rest?
The Alphabet, from Egypt to Rome
To begin at the beginning: once upon a time, in the ancient kingdom of Egypt, our letters looked like things.
Each emerging letter signified one sound; that sound was determined by the first sound of the words for those things. This is the revolutionary principle at the root of our alphabet’s history, a realignment of old hieroglyphs behind a single sound-based rule.
Note the word word there. Items of vocabulary were essential intermediaries in setting up this longlasting system of ‘one sound for one symbol’. These ordinary words were also summoned to serve as the new letters’ names.
For an example, a glottal stop was one such sound of speech in need of a letter. So, a glottal-starting word in the Semitic language of the alphabetic innovators was required. The everyday noun chosen was ʾalp, meaning ‘ox’. Now, a hieroglyphic head of cattle would spell that throaty consonant whenever required.
The ox’s head was now, in a nascent way, a letter. As such, it needed a name, a means of referring to it in ancient spelling lessons. It was christened ʾalp, unsurprisingly. Much the same way that we today might say ‘oh no, that’s spelled with an A’, the earliest alphabetic writers might critique a miswritten word with ‘you forgot the ʾalp there, my friend’.
If you think this is all irrelevant antiquity, allow me to make it familiar. This ʾalp character is the origin of our letter A. It would make its way up the coast of the Mediterranean, landing in the hands of the Phoenicians. These maritime marvels of the Levant continued to call it ʾalp, and to use it for a glottal stop, but its shape had by then been reduced to a three-lined 𐤀.
They then passed the parcel to the Greeks. They repurposed 𐤀 as a vowel, a drastic change to the sound of the letter. The Greeks also settled on Α, a rotated version of 𐤀, but they did maintain the old names. Α was and is alpha.
You know more old Semitic vocabulary than you think – the ox is one part of the alpha-bet, just as triangular river deltas find an etymological origin in Semitic-speakers’ doors.
From the Greeks, the system would sail west, to Italy. There it would be put into the hands of the peninsula’s regional powers at the time: the Etruscans, the Oscans, the Umbrians, the Veneti, the Gauls, and the then-unimportant settlements that would eventually coalesce into Rome. Within one of the three qualities of the letters (sound, shape, name), there was another break in transmission after the letters arrived in Italy. It was a total redesign of their names.
We don’t know for how long the Greeks remembered that the origin of their letter names was in ordinary Semitic words; regardless, another step further west was another step away from Semitic speakers who could have reminded early alphabetic writers of that fact. As soon as we reach a period in ancient Italy’s history with enough literacy and literature to find the letter names written down, we see that they have been renamed.
Either by the Etruscans or the Romans (more likely the latter), a radical new system had been devised, which dispensed with the old Graeco-Semitic names. In their place was a simple principle: briefly name the letter by the sound that it represents.
With the vowel letters (A, E, I, O, U), the vowel sound could straightforwardly be the name. The Romans knew this quintet of letters as ‘aa’, ‘ehh’, ‘ee’, ‘ohh’ and ‘oo’.
For those letters representing consonants, an extra E-vowel was usually added to the name, to make it a comfortably complete syllable.
A meaningless hodgepodge of ancient names had thereby been streamlined; the Greeks’ beta, delta, lamda, pi, sigma and tau became the Romans’ be, de, el, pe, es and te. From this point, add in a couple of millennia of use and natural sound change, and you arrive at some very familiar names.
The alphabetic status quo that resulted from the renaming was the classical Roman alphabet, as it would’ve been known, taught and used in the days of Caesar and Cicero. This updated version of the already-ancient alphabet is the common ancestor (in sound, shape and name) of many subsequent sub-alphabets used today, including English’s own.
Phonetic Logic
However, despite the attempt to rename the letters according to one rule, there were further factors at work.
Take, for example, the Romans’ names for C, K and Q. These were ce, ka and qu, pronounced ‘keh’, ‘kah’ and ‘koo’. These are recognisably the origins of the English names: ce, kay and cue (isn’t it odd to see the names written out so?).
As we assume, with good reason, that a C was for the Romans always a hard /k/ sound (hear IPA notation here), then this trio of vowels in the three names was a necessity. They separated the names for three letters that all represented the sound /k/. Bear in mind that the English name of C containing a /s/ sound comes from a post-Roman development. The same applies to our softly spoken G, which was once only a hard /g/.
Yet there is an even bigger pattern behind the Romans’ names, and therefore those still current in English. This pattern demonstrates an awareness of phonetics, of the properties of the sounds of speech.
Consider the Romans names for B, D and P. In them, the defining consonant comes first, before the vowel: be, de and pe. From these, via the Great Vowel Shift, come the English names bee, dee and pee.
Now consider F, L, M and S. In them, the defining consonant comes second, after the vowel: ef, el, em and es.
To appreciate the full before/after pattern at play, we can write out the classical alphabet in full:
What we have here is a split along a phonetic line, according to the qualities of the individual sounds.
With those consonants that halt and then release the airflow (known as ‘stop’ or ‘plosive’ sounds), they precede the vowel in the name. These stops were the /b, k, d, g, k, p, k, t/ sounds behind the Romans’ letters B, C, D, G, K, P, Q and T.
With other consonants, made with an uninterrupted stream of air, the defining sound came second in their Roman letter names. These were the nasal sounds /m, n/, the fricatives /f, s/ and the liquids /l, r/, spelled with M, N, F, S, L, R.
The alphabet had originally been named through words for everyday objects. Now, sounds and their properties were leading the way.
There are, of course, some exceptions to the rule. Nothing in human language is ever perfect. The letter H ought to be in the ‘after’ category, denoting as it did the breathy fricative /h/. Inversely, X spelled the duo of sounds /ks/, beginning with a stop sound that should have put it in the ‘before’ category. If following the phonetic principle to the letter, the Romans would've called H and X ‘eh’ and ‘kse’.
However, such arrangements of sounds would’ve been uncomfortable for classical mouths. Spoken Latin had a dislike ending syllables with /h/ or starting them with /ks/, a dislike that English happens to share.
Time also has complicated the picture. As mentioned already, the Romans assigned C and G to the ‘before’ camp because the letters then stood for the stops /k/ and /g/. Regular sound change in later centuries produced the soft pronunciations of C and G that their English names contain today: namely, the /s/ fricative of the C in centre and city, and the /d͡ʒ/ affricate of the G in gell and gist. Such post-classical changes have slightly obscured the original phonetic rule behind the Roman renaming, but the logic can still be recovered.
That rationale leaves me amazed by the ancients’ understanding of the properties of speech, apparently without any scholarly study resembling our modern field of phonetics.
A Personal Phonetic Epilogue
This history of letter names makes up the meat of Chapter M in my book, Why Q Needs U. In the absence of much else to say about the letter M, the chapter offered a chance to discuss this pattern pertaining to the alphabet as a whole.
I must admit, though, that I didn’t address the obvious question: why? Why did Roman (or Etruscan) writers rename the letters according to this phonetic rule? The answer wasn’t obvious to me, and I feared that my readers wouldn’t be willing to take any more of my trademark academic caution and speculation.
However, in November, I threw the question out to an audience of experts: the linguists of the University of Edinburgh. This sundry crew, united in their loveliness, comprised scholars of languages of both the past and the present day, and it was the phoneticians among them who seem to have cracked the puzzle. Gilly Marchini and Benjamin Molineaux in particular recognised that acoustic clarity may be the key.
The letter names had a need to include and indicate their associated sound as clearly as possible. It would be a bad system that leaves its users unclear whether someone had just said F or G.
The thing is, stop sounds are clearest when they precede a vowel, standing at the start of a syllable. When used so, the burst (as the airflow is released) is relatively loud and audible. In contrast, at the end of a syllable or word, the burst and other qualities of a stop are often not so strident.
“If you listen carefully to the sounds at the end of the words nab, mad, nag, you may find that the so-called voiced consonants /b, d, g/ have very little voicing and might also be called voiceless … It would be more normal to say each of them without releasing the final consonants … You could even say cab and not open your lips for a considerable period of time if it were the last word of an utterance. In such circumstances, it is quite clear that the final consonants are not fully voiced throughout the closure.”
(Ladefoged & Johnson 2011: 61)
Meanwhile, the other categories of sound (the nasals, the fricatives and the liquids) might be louder and clearer after the vowel, in what’s known as the ‘coda’ of a syllable. This quality would make them better suited to coming second in the Romans’ system, something that the enduring names ef, el, em, en, er and es attest to.
Now I have the small matter of learning how to travel back in time, to include this insight (with due credit) in the drafts of my book. Failing that, it can wait for the paperback edition.
END.
References
Ladefoged, P., & Johnson, K. (2011). A Course in Phonetics. Sixth edition. Wadsworth Cengage Learning
Wallace, R. (2011). The Latin alphabet and orthography. In Clackson, J. (ed.) A Companion to the Latin Language. 7-28. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Images my own or from Wikimedia. Original Substack article.
So glad I found your Substack! I remember following you back in the day on Twitter and this is a great medium for you!
When can we expect the paperback edition?