lot of Wikipeda.

OK, now that we're past that, isn't the latin alphabet cool? And by cool I mean everywhere?

If you live anywhere that at some point in history has been dominated by western europeans,

which is to say almost everywhere, you probably don't even think of it as the latin alphabet,

it's probably just "writing" to you, unless you're weird like I am, or like you're about

to be because you will have watched this video. But at some point very early on in most of

our lives, like, when we're in grade school, there is a period when we're like "why is

there a letter for X? Couldn't we just represent that with a ks?" and "why should we have the

letter c? Aren't it's sounds already covered by s and k?". Well, prepare to have you questions

answered in this video, where I explain the bizarre and arbitrary history of all of the

letters in the English language, in order of least interesting to most interesting.

Now, the ones with the simplest stories are these guys. Their evolution was relatively

straightforward. See, you know how the ancient Sumerians invented writing? Well, you do now,

but just because they did it first doesn't mean everyone else learned how from them.

The ancient Egyptians actually came up with a completely different system of writing all

on their own, and Egyptian hieroglyphs evolved into a writing system called Phoenician. Probably?

Maybe? Either way, we're fairly certain that the look of the Phoenician letters was actually

based off Phoenician words that started with that sound. This represented a goad, which

was a thing you farmed with. This is a person's head. This is a . . . mouth?! This is supposed

to be a tooth? Look, they simplified them a lot, just go with it.

Now, at this point you might be asking, what on earth does this have to do with the letters

B, K, S, D, Z, L, M, N, P, T and R? Well, while we're not sure about the link between

Egyptian and Phoenician, we are quite sure that the Greeks learned how to write from

the Phoenicians, the Romans learned how to write from the Greeks and the English learned

how to write from the Romans. Mostly, kind of, anyway, at each transition here a lot

of the letters changed a little bit, including these. This is how B changed, here's K, here's

S, D, Z, L, M, N, P, T and R. Think that was complicated? Wait till we get to some of these

others.

The letter X is also relatively simple. See, the greeks had this letter for a K sound and

this letter for a s sound, and when they wrote them for some reason they decided to just

leave off the second one. So then when the Romans learned to write from the Greeks, the

romans were like wait, so what does that letter represent? Oh, that makes a ks sound. So you

guys have a letter for two sounds? Well, kind of, I guess, Oh, and the Romans rolled with

it.

Now let's talk about the vowels. See, the ancient Phoenicians didn't write vowels. Now,

this is that part where you go WHAAT? How did they write without vowels? What do you

even mean? If the words pat, pot, pate, pet, peat, pit and put were all spelled pt, then

how would you know which one I was referring to? Well, the answer is that the Phoenicians

didn't really have many groups of words like that in there language. Even though if we

tried to write like that in English it wouldn't work out very well, because of the way the

Semitic languages work grammatically writing in all consonants worked just fine for them.

The same, however, could not be said for the Greeks. The Greeks were like us. They needed

vowels. Luckily, this weird thing happened. See, the Phoenician alphabet was said to have

been brought to Greece by I guy named Cadmus, who was like, "OK, guys, the name of each

letter starts with the sound that the letter represents, for instance, this is "bet" it

makes a "b" sound. This is "Gaml," it makes a "G" sound." "OK Cadmus, so what about this

one?" "Oh, that? It's called "Alf." Now, the sound Cadmus was pronouncing was called a

glottal stop, a sound that you make by closing off you're glottis and that we make all the

time subconsciously and that it's really hard for us to even notice. Similarly, the Greeks

couldn't hear the glottal stop at the beginning of "Alf," so they just assumed that it made

an "ah" sound. That happened with a bunch of other weird, pharyngal Semitic sounds,

where the name of the letter was supposed to be pronounced with a consonant but the

Greeks couldn't hear the consonant so they just make the letter represent the first vowel

of the word. Or at least, that's the way it worked for

three of them. See, one of the weird semitic Phoenician sounds was pronounced "H", and

it was completely separate from the normal H "h" sound. So Cadmus was like "OK, this

letter is Het and this letter is he" and the greeks looked at each other and were like

"they both sound like huh sounds only one's weird." "It sounds like he's really emphasizing

the Het one. Maybe he means that the one that's less breathy actually starts with a vowel?"

"What ever. Let's go with that." So the h letter became an e letter and the H letter

became a h letter. We'll get to these two latter, they'r more interesting.

Now that we've covered the vowels I can talk about the letter J, which evolved from the

letter I. Why would a letter that makes a J sound evolve from a letter that makes an

I sound? Well, the french used to just have the letter I, but then they started pronouncing

a lot of their I sounds as J sounds for some reason. They wanted to distinguish between

these two sounds in their writing, so they made up the letter J.

OK, now I'll cover these letters. The greeks had this one letter that made what's called

a close-front rounded vowel, or basically and ee sound but if you pursed you lips like

when you pronounce oo. So I think it would be roughly like y. The romans heard this and

thought it sounded basically like a oo sound, so they chopped off the bottom stem and made

it into their letter for the oo sound. Now, the greeks had modified their letter for oo

to represent the oo sound's more consonantly cousin, the w sound, and they made it into

the letter ef. The romans didn't have a wa sound, or, at least they didn't distinguish

it from their oo sound, so they used that letter for a sound they had but the Greeks

didn't the F sound. And everything was hunky-dory, until about

the first century BC when the Romans started taking over Greece along with the rest of

Europe and they dug up all these writings from cool greek dudes like plato and aristotle

and Homer and they started transliterating a lot of greek names and stuff into Latin,

and when they did this they decided to keep names that had the letter y in it as a y.

Later, when the English adopted the Roman alphabet, they would use the letter Y to do

the same thing the greeks did with it: to represent the weird eeoo sound. But why, you

ask. English doesn't have a eeoo sound. Well, it used to, until we started pronouncing it

like a y or a I or a ee sound instead. So, back to rome. They had a letter for oo

and w, one for f and one for transliterating greek words and everything was fine, but then

the romans started pronouncing some their words that had w sounds in them as v sounds,

so they made up this variant of the oo letter for their new v sound.

So everything was fine until they wanted to represent English with these letters, and

the English wanted a letter to represent their w sound, unlike the romans who were content

with using the same letter for oo w. So they stuck two Us together and called it the double-you

and used it to represent the w sound. So we have Five letters in modern English that come

from this one greek letter.

Now for these letters. You know how I've been talking about how the Roman's learned how

to write from the Greeks? Well, that's partially true. See, the Romans learned how to write

from two people, the Greeks and these guys called Etruscans, who lived just north of

them. The Etruscans themselves learned from the Greeks, so mostly I just ignore them,

but here, when dealing with the letters C, Q and G they're important. The Phoenicians

had these three letters, one for their k sound, one for their s sound, and one for their weird

semitic q sound. This was all well and good until the Greeks took all three of these letters

even though they had no q sound, because they had assigned each letter a number and started

doing math with them because they hadn't adopted arabic numerals yet and gosh darn it they

needed some symbols to do math with and if they just dropped the weird proto-q letter

they wouldn't have a number ninety. So then when the Etruscans, who not only didn't have

a q sound but they didn't have a g sound either, learned how to write, they did the smart thing

and only took one letter to represent their one sound. Except they couldn't hear the difference

between k and g so they just took the one that looked cooler.

This was fine until the Romans, who did have both a K and a G sound, learned to write from

the Etruscans. They needed to distinguish between k and g and they only had one letter

for the both of them, so they split the letter C into two letters, the letter C and the letter

G, one to make a k sound and the other to make a g sound. They also, for really no apparent

reason, took the the letter q from the Greeks and used it to make a kw sound, even though

they already had a k and a w letter. And then the Romans started transliterating

Greek stuff, and, like with the letter Y, they introduced a whole new letter to represent

the old greek names: the letter k. So now the romans had two different letters for k

sounds, and then when we adopted the Latin alphabet we took both letters for our k sound.

Now, that explains why we have two letters for the k sound, but it doesn't explain why

we pronounce the letter c as a "s" sometimes. Well, that's just because of random changes

in pronunciation in English that's caused us to pronounce some "k" sounds as "s" sounds.

So that's why the alphabet is the way it is. It's kind of annoying in how ridiculously

arbitrary it is, but for the same reason it's kind of beautiful. This writing system and

these letters that surround us everywhere in life are the result of historical events

that happened thousands of years ago. This is why I love linguistics. It reveals that

facets of the language that surrounds me, even if they seem arbitrary and needlessly

complicated, actually connect me to an ancient, three-thousand year old tradition. Once I

realized that, I felt like I was living in the ruins of an ancient civilization, with

shadows and phantoms of people and events that existed millennia ago constantly dancing

around me. Still think it's stupid and arbitrary? Well, welcome to the club.