Oh.

It, it, it, so, and it would've, once upon a time, they would've been walk and talk.

And then because of the L, specifically dark L, you go welk and telk, and then you get maybe what would be something like walk and talk with an added oo sound, and then maybe talk and walk in, I don't know, maybe late medieval, early modern periods.

The L at this point is basically part of the vowel.

It drops out or it becomes increasingly inaudible, and eventually you end up with my English pronunciation of walk and talk.

Take out the L, you get whack and tack.

So it does, it is, it deserves to be there.

Have you got any tips for how you do what you do?

[chuckles]

... initial, uh, character, because I remain just profoundly grateful and a little bit spooked by how well the alphabet's prime letter, uh, is, uh, serves as an introduction to all of alphabetic history.

Um, and by this I mean that the letter A is one of the original members of the gang.

Uh, there's a kind of core of our 26 letters that goes all the way back to the alphabet's earliest years, and the letter A is one of that gang and also looks like its original prototype or design, so when it first, uh, set, uh, started out.

Um, so for context, the alphabet we can say is born round about the year 1900 to 1800 BC, give or take a century.

Okay? It's very, uh, complex, not in a bad way.

It's a delicious debate to get stuck into, but we're working from fragments and scraps of evidence that just happen to have survived for millennia since then.

Yeah.

It always has to have a U after it and be- because who says so?

[laughs] I would say who says so? I would pin this, uh, on the door of the Romans.

Basically, Q, just like A, is one of the original members of the gang, and it probably starts out life as a kind of a pictographic monkey.

I think that's the strongest theory, that Q looks like a monkey, and it stands for the consonant at the beginning of the inventor's word for monkey, like a kind of k sound.

It's not quite k, but it's a bit different.

So it fully deserves its place in the alphabet to begin with.

But as the alphabet and as that letter passes through very different kinds of spoken languages with very different sounds, it becomes sup- superfluous.

So why do we do that?

Is there any reason for that historically?

Yes, and the short answer is too many reasons.

That's the problem, and, and that's not, that's not a cop-out.

That's me.

You know, I love this question, but it, it's, it's a big question.

And when I say too many reasons, what I mean is that there are Too many valid principles behind English spelling, and they're in competition, so they're fighting over the different ways of spelling.

They're fighting for the same job in many cases as well.

What about silent letters? What's the historical root of those, and what's the point of them?

Is that it?

That's nice, yeah.

That was a very important point to me.

I'm not a big fan of English bashing, nor am I a big fan of English elevating by saying it's some sort of perfect language.

I'm just not a fan in general of English exceptionalism, of basically raising it up as somehow different, because I think that loses so much of the power and the magic of what's actually gone on.

In short, people, you know, it's all a product of lots of different people speaking in lots of different ways.

If you, say, go back to the Middle Ages, the high Middle Ages, around about the year 1300s, you have tremendous linguistic diversity across Europe, indeed across the world.

Can you tell us what that is and what we can do to get it back in circulation? Because I love it.

Is there some hidden benefit to English spelling's conservatism? For example, is there something that preserves the relationships here between the words and the roots and the meanings by having these fossils, or is it, is it disadvantageous that we hold on to everything?

everything?Yes.

I think that's, that's so well said.

It is something that I have got on my little soapbox and talked about.

If we are to reform spelling, if we-- let's say we're gonna make it totally phonemic, let's bring everything back to a sort of one-to-one basis of, uh, sound to letter, um, great.

I'll just add that when we embark on this incredible reform, this massive international project, it may well happen someday, um, there will be some babies that get thrown out with the bathwater because there are many things, uh, many alternative systems, uh, uh, th- systems to do with understanding words, recognizing words, making etymological connections between words, um, that are preserved in the medium of writing.

So take, for example, a K-N-O-W.

W-if you were in charge of redoing the spelling in the English language, would you do it? And, um, and would it be difficult to get people to agree on it?

So can you speak to that period of time called the great vowel shift and how even those combinations of E-E and E-A, how at one point they were actually distinguishable from each other, whereas today they sound one and the same?

Yes, I love that.

I'm so pleased that you mentioned that because if it ever crosses people's minds and they wonder, well, these letters or these sounds are spelt with different letters or they're spelt in different ways, doesn't that mean that they should have different sounds? They probably did nine times out of 10, but speech keeps changing.

And E is a great example of this because we have something like I don't know, meet and meet in English, that meets the activity of meeting someone and meet the food.

And these have different spellings and they were once pronounced differently.

We can tell that not only because of the spelling, but because of poetry.

Poetry is so important for gaining a window into how people are speaking in the past because they're constructing poetry according to things like rhymes.

So how did we end up, when we think about the history of the alphabet, how did we end up with both of these letters? And did word origin perhaps influence our spelling distinctions of when to use which letter in which appropriate time?