Just my type — tracing the evolution of letters, (part 1)
When we talk about “design”, we usually mean a designer crafting an object or idea, like a car or an advertising campaign. Running shoes are designed, rocks are not. Buildings are designed, air is not. Even abstract art is designed, as the artist chooses their colours, brushes, and strokes to incite emotion in the viewer.
Most of our everyday items like hairbrushes, or pants, are well designed. You can tell why they were made that way. That’s why the alphabet sticks out as so unusual to me. We learn it by memorization early in our lives, use it every day, and rarely question why it’s designed the way it is. It’s full of inexplicable details that seem to serve no real purpose. Have you noticed that the typed letter “a” looks nothing like the handwritten version? Same with g. And what about italics, why do we need slanty letters so readily available? What about serifs? What purpose could such a small yet widespread detail serve? Why do we have a double-U, but not a triple-U?
Today we’re going to answer “Who designed the alphabet, and why is it designed this way?”
Humble Beginnings
Let’s go back. Way back, to the first writing, at the start of recorded history around 3250 BCE. Don’t put your stuff down, we won’t be here long. The Egyptians were one of the first cultures¹ to use symbols, often little pictures, to represent things. We call their pictures hieroglyphs. Over time, they got more complex, spread to other cultures, and the pictures representing ideas became letters and words. One of the cultures that absorbed these symbols was the Phoenicians, a nearby sea-based civilization that inhabited modern-day Lebanon around 1550 BCE. The new Phoenician language spread to the nearby Greeks, who formed it into the ancient Greek alphabet. We’re moving pretty quickly, we’ve covered about 2300 years in seven sentences. Here’s our first landmark, the Greek Alphabet. You’ll already recognize some of those letters, such as Alpha and Beta at the very beginning. This is also the origin of the word “alphabet”, from alphabeta.
Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω
At some point around 1200 BCE, a new language split off from Greek in the Latium region of modern-day Italy². This is an era where myths and facts are tightly woven together, so there’s plenty of legends about exactly how and when this new language came about. Rome was established by Latin tribes in 753 BCE, and by 27 BCE the city had grown into a sizeable empire, spreading Latin all around the Mediterranean. We can hit the brakes now, we’ve arrived somewhere important.
What the Romans did for us
In converting Greek into Latin, some letters had been lost, while others were modified. Alpha and Beta, for example, become A and B. The seventh letter of the alphabet, Z (or Zeta) was allegedly purged by Roman Censor (a powerful bureaucrat) Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign³. As a result, around this time, the Latin alphabet likely had 21 letters:
A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X
The problem with writing is that it’s usually done on paper, which doesn’t last very long. Monuments do last, and the Romans created a time capsule of their writing in plain sight on monuments such as the Pantheon (125 CE), Trajan’s Column (113 CE), and the Arch of Titus (81CE). Just like everything the Romans did, the inscribed letters were elegant, functional, and mathematically perfect. We call them Roman Capitals, from the Latin word “Capitalis”, meaning “of the head.” I assume this refers to the head (or top) of the monument.
Typography nerds might notice that these letters have serifs, the little pointy bits extending from the corners. These are the first known examples of serifs on letters, and they’re probably there by accident. Before the letters are chiselled into stone, they’re painted onto the surface, to guide the stonecutter. Historian Edward Catich suggests the flat brush used to stencil the letters onto the stone likely left little swashes on the corners which the stonecutter dutifully etched into the stone. So, it’s possible serifs were invented entirely by accident. Unfortunately, there’s no one around to ask. While we’re talking about serifs, you should know there’s no definitive evidence that either serifs or sans serif typefaces are easier to read than the other- legibility is made up of many components, of which serifs are only one⁴.
When the Romans invaded Greece in the 1st century BCE, among other treasures, they brought back the letters Y and Z to write Greek loan words. These “new” letters were added to the end of the alphabet. Around this time, Emperor Claudius decided Latin needed more letters, and added Ↄ, Ⅎ, and Ⱶ. While his contemporaries respected him enough to use his letters while he was alive, they didn’t stick around after this death. This is the classical Latin alphabet as we know it now, with 23 letters circa 54 CE.
A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z
One oddball letter that’s been in and out of the alphabet for the last 2000 years is the ampersand (&). It developed from the Latin word et, meaning “and.” Over a few hundred years, it became more and more stylized, until e and t were no longer recognizable. At times when it was considered a letter, it was placed after Z as a 27th letter. If you want to know more, you can even read up on how it got its foreign-sounding name.
As we all know, things didn’t end well for the Romans, but their legacy has just as much of an influence in writing as it does in any other aspect of modern life. While Roman capitals were gorgeous, they certainly weren’t used for everyday handwriting. Romans had a separate system of handwritten letters, which was much easier and faster for communication.
Of Scribes and Scripts
A few hundred years later, out of the ashes of the Roman Empire, medieval scribes had evolved the Roman letters to become more efficient to write. When your whole job is writing, you’ll probably end up finding the best way to write a letter. In one of the earlier handwriting styles, Uncial, we can see the first double-decker “a” start to form. Take a look:
You might notice the Insular style (third from bottom) looks distinctly “Irish”, like something you’d see on an Irish pub.
Gaelic script is actually a direct descendant of Insular script, used commonly in Ireland up until the mid 20th century. Coincidentally, Irish missionaries were responsible for bringing the Uncial-style Latin alphabet to the Anglo-Saxon language (also called Old English)⁶. Up until the 8th century, Anglo-Saxon tribes in… Angland… used runic alphabets brought from the area we now call Germany. Since Latin was the language of Christianity, I assume the change was made in order to increase the holiness of the Anglo-Saxons.
We’ve been knee-deep in Latin letters until now, but with this fateful clash of Latin letters and the Old English language, we need to pause and talk about the writing system that Latin is about to replace: runes. What are they? Our knowledge of the runic alphabet is a little sketchy, though we know it’s an alphabet that originated around 150 CE and it branched off of a language used in the Italian peninsula- potentially even Latin. Runic writing spread in the Germanic tribes north of the Roman empire, including the Angles and Saxons, who would later merge tribes and migrate to England. As Christianity expanded in Europe, the Latin alphabet gradually replaced runic alphabets.
Early Anglophony
The problem is, the Latin letters weren’t a perfect match for Old English. Not every sound could be replicated by Latin letters. To solve this, some letters were modified, creating Æ, Œ, and Ð. Obviously, these letters were runaway successes, and I’m sure you use them daily.
A few runes were also borrowed from Anglo-Saxon, notably thorn (Þ), wyn (Ƿ) and yogh (Ȝ). Again, runaway successes that you probably use daily. Though none of these letters made the cut, they had some pretty interesting effects on our language.
Thorn Þ
Þ made the “th” sound and stuck around in the alphabet for quite a while. It was often confused for lowercase y in handwriting, and even after Þ disappeared from the alphabet, people continued to use the letter y in its place. If you’re wondering where the phrase “Ye old pub” came from, it’s actually “Þe old pub,” and pronounced as “The old pub.” Þat’s a fact. It was fully replaced by “th” in the 15th century.
Wyn Ƿ
Ƿ was used for the “w” sound and saw a fair amount of variation- often being written as two U’s instead of Ƿ. You can probably see where this is going. The use of UU became consistent in the 12th and 13th centuries, and with time its curves became points. It’s unclear why UU/W was a better alternative than Ƿ, but maybe it looks a little too much like a P. I’ll let you decide.
Yogh Ȝ
Ȝ was used for y sounds, as well as “voiceless velar fricative,” a sound we don’t have in English anymore. It’s similar to the sound of clearing your throat, or the “ch” part of a Scottish person saying “loch” or “ach.” As spelling became more standardized in English, and the fact that printing presses manufactured outside of England lacked this letter, it was replaced by the “gh” letter pair. This is a problematic change, especially considering the complete loss of the sound in English. Just look at words like cough, taught, and though. Same gh, all new sounds!
At this point, we’ve developed our Middle English alphabet circa 1400 CE, with 28 letters- the language for Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” It’s missing the K, Q, and Z, which scribes weren’t actively using. This somehow looks less modern than it did 1500 years ago:
A Æ B C D Ð E F Ȝ H I L M N O P R S T Þ V Ƿ X Y
Try saying your ABCs with those. How did we get from this to our modern alphabet in less than 500 years? It involves a German goldsmith, a repurposed winepress, and the birth of an entirely new industry that changed the course of human history. Check out part 2 to find out how the story of our alphabet ends!
Footnotes
1. Though it’s disputed whether the Egyptians came up with writing on their own or whether they were influenced by the Mesopotamians, who had developed writing around that time as well.
2. Technically Greek first became Etruscan, then Latin.
3. Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, III.261
4. See research by Alex Poole on Serif vs. Sans Serif readability.
5. Image licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
6. Crystal, David (1987). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge University Press. p. 203. ISBN 0–521–26438–3.
7. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
Disclaimer: This general interest article covers a significant portion of recorded history, and as such, important details that didn’t directly serve the narrative of this article have been omitted. Some omissions are minor and others are major, so I encourage you to explore any of the topics above if they sparked your interest. If you believe I omitted a critical detail, please let me know! Comments from history nerds, fact-checkers, and historical skeptics are welcomed. Thanks for reading!
