by Mary Norris
Alphabetical order is remarkably stable: the first two letters have stuck all the way from the Phoenician aleph bet, lending their names to the Greek αλφάβητο and the Roman alphabetum and the English alphabet. The only other word I can think of that stands for a set or an order of things and is known by its members is solfège, the system of musical syllables, containing sol and fa, which is also a system for reading, in this case tones instead of words. There are a few theories about what lies behind alphabetical order, some involving shape, some involving sound.
From the very first letters, the Greek alphabet signals the importance of the vowel-consonant relationship: alpha beta. The vowels in both Greek and English are spaced out over the length of the alphabet, like big beads alternating with strings of small beads:
Α Β Γ Δ Ε Ζ Η Θ Ι Κ Λ Μ Ν Ξ Ο Π Ρ Σ Τ Υ Φ Χ Ψ Ω
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X (Y) Z
It is the combination of vowels and consonants that makes the alphabet so elastic.
The consonants that were added represented sounds Greeks had that Phoenicians didn’t, and they were placed to follow upsilon (Y). The Greek alphabet took over from the Phoenician alphabet as a tool of trade, traveling west in the Mediterranean. Every language that adopted the alphabet adapted it for its own needs. The Etruscans latched on to the Greek alphabet early. Among their contributions was the letter F, repurposing a Greek letter that was pronounced like our W. When the Romans adapted the Etruscan alphabet, they jettisoned several letters because they had no need for them. But during the first century BC the Romans started to use Greek words, so they put back the letters Y and Z, adding the “new” letters to the end.
Anglo-Saxons began to use Roman letters to write Old English when they converted to Christianity in about the seventh century AD. Before that, they used runes. Russians traditionally got their written language when Cyril and Methodius, brothers who were Byzantine monks and missionaries, adapted the Greek alphabet (“perfected” it, the Russians say), adding letters to represent Slavic sounds. Hence it is called the Cyrillic alphabet.
In this way, the original Phoenician aleph bet was shaped, sometimes by a single person, into a system of writing that transcended its commercial usefulness and made it into a tool for the preservation of memory, for recording history and making art: a gift of the Muses and for the Muses.
ONE WAY OF MASTERING the letters in the Greek alphabet is to think of them as characters. A “character” is a symbol for recording language. On Twitter, you originally had to limit your remarks to 140 characters, including all punctuation and spaces between words. (The limit was later doubled to 280 characters, a decision of dubious merit.) The word comes from the ancient Greek charásso, meaning to “make sharp, cut into furrows, engrave.” The leap from a symbol graved in stone to a person endowed with a sharply defined personality is a good example of the way a word ripples out into metaphor.
Can a character, as in a letter of the alphabet, have a character, in the abstract sense of a distinct trait? Certain associations have grown up around the letters that are used as grades in school: A is excellent, B is not as good as A (the B list, a B movie), C is average, D is disappointing, and F is failure, a mark of shame. Then again A is for adultery; it is the scarlet letter with which Nathaniel Hawthorne branded Hester Prynne. Superman has a big red S. Vladimir Nabokov devotes a few paragraphs in his autobiography, Speak, Memory (its title an invocation to the mother of the Muses), to the colors he associates with letters of the alphabet: his “blue group” includes “steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry h.” He goes on, “Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. . . . The word for rainbow . . . is in my private language the hardly pronounceable: kzspygv.” I think we can agree that Nabokov was hallucinating and stick to an English mnemonic for the colors of the rainbow, Roy G. Biv, an acronym for red orange yellow green blue indigo violet.
Greek letters have their own mystique. Outside of an encounter with pi (π) in geometry class, I did not see Greek characters until I got to college and was puzzled by the symbols attached to the facades of fraternity houses: a gigantic X (chi), a pitchfork Ψ (psi), an impenetrable Φ (phi). No one who is not a member of the fraternity is privy to the secret motto that the characters stand for. Still, if these are the only Greek letters that people are likely to encounter, it is worth looking at “Greek life” as a way into Greek letters.
The first Greek fraternity in America was founded at William and Mary College in 1776, by a student named John Heath. He had supposedly been rejected from a study group with a Latin name, and his response was to found his own study group and give it a Greek name—that would show them. Greek has more snob appeal than Latin. So he formed Phi Beta Kappa. Its members were students of upstanding character who studied hard and got good grades. Phi Beta Kappa (ΦΒΚ) stood for Philosophia Biou Kybernetes: “The love of wisdom is the guide of life.” “Philo” + “sophia” is “love of wisdom”; in “Kybernetes” you can almost make out the word “govern” (through Latin guberno, to steer); and “Biou” is the genitive form of “bio,” life, as in biol ogy (the study of life) and biography (the writing of a life). The copulative verb—“is”—is understood.
Frat boys and sorority girls take their vow of secrecy very seriously. I could persuade only one Greek society, of honors English majors, called Sigma Tau Delta (ΣΤΔ), to reveal its motto to me—Sincerity, Truth, Design. Perhaps this transparency helps to distance its members from the ready association with its English initials: STD.
The fictional Delta Tau Chi (ΔΤΧ) is as nearly the opposite of Phi Beta Kappa as a fraternity can be, its members known as animals for their wild behavior, which supplied the name for both their campus digs and the movie: Animal House. If we knew what secret motto lurked behind those letters (Drink to Excess?), we would have a link between the Greek characters and the characters portrayed in the film.
I have a couple of books about the alphabet—one about the Greek alphabet and two about the English alphabet—but even to an alphabetophile like me these books get boring somewhere around “D is for Delta.” They are just too predictable—we know how the alphabet ends—and one begins to gasp for air between K and L, which is not quite halfway. So let’s skip on down to the end, where the Greeks added the three consonants they needed for sounds the Phoenicians did not have. One is phi, which sounds like f but is usually transliterated in ancient Greek as ph. Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, was Philippos in Greek: lover (philos) of horses (hippos). A hippopotamus is a horse of the river.
Another such character is psi, which may be my favorite letter. It can be found at the beginning of every English word that is a variant on psyche: psychology, psychotherapy, psychiatry, psychoanalyst, psychosomatic, psychopath, psychopharmacopeia, all descended from Psyche, the lover of Eros, who was the son of Aphrodite. The psi looks like a trident, attribute of Poseidon, god of the sea, and it is the first letter in the modern Greek word for fish: ψάρι (psári).
The third is chi, the one that looks like an X but is most often transliterated as the hard ch in chaos. It is the trickster of the Greek alphabet. It is not the same as our English X—no way. For that, the Greeks have a completely different letter, xi (Ξ). Speakers of English often have trouble pronouncing words with ch in them—melancholy, chalcedony, chiropodist, chimera—because ch also represents the sound in such common English words as church, chicken, and cheese. (You could say our alphabet is imperfect.) To be fair, Greeks cannot pronounce our ch, which is why, in the classic Greek-diner skits on the old Saturday Night Live, John Belushi always called out, “Tseezbourger, tseezbourger, tseezbourger.”
Some translators prefer to skip over the Roman tradition and write chi as kh, for more of a Greek flavor. We are used to seeing the Roman spelling of Achilles, but the name appears in some translations of the Iliad a
nd the Odyssey as Akhilleus. In modern Greek, the consonant sound of chi is a cross between k and h, like the ch of the Hebrew words Chanukah and Chasidic. Some people lack the chutzpah to pronounce that sound and are unable to ask you to pass the challah. Sometimes, chi is transliterated with an h instead of a ch, again as in Hebrew: Hanukkah, Hasidic. So this chi that looks like X takes three forms in English: ch, kh, and h. When the transliterating goes in the opposite direction, for instance, when a Greek wants to spell out the name Hilton, as in the Athens Hilton, he might go with Chilton. An American might laugh at that—it’s against company policy—and the sound of laughter in Greek is spelled with chi: χα-χα.
The character that looks like X has a nonalphabetical use that is common to both languages. According to Scribes and Scholars, a study by L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson of how Greek and Roman literature was preserved and transmitted through the ages, one of the ways that scholars at the Library of Alexandria notated a point of textual interest was by writing the letter chi in the margin. A penciled-in X is still the mark that a conservative reader—that is, one who prefers not to deface a book—puts in the margin next to a line he wants to revisit.
Many of the surviving works of the Greeks—including Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, and Aristotle—have come down to us in the form we have them thanks to the work of the diligent librarians of Alexandria, who, beginning around 280 BC, under Ptolemy Philadelphus, established the canon. If it were not for the ancient librarians, we would not have this trove of books. According to the Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, Aristophanes of Byzantium, the head librarian around 200 BC, purportedly invented or regularized the diacritical marks that are such a headache for students of the classics. The librarians cataloged and classified and established authenticity and published authoritative editions. Imagine, the Oresteia of Aeschylus squeaked through in a single degraded manuscript! The first play in this masterly trilogy, Agamemnon, had to be pieced together from fragments. Librarians encouraged a tradition of respect for literature, working to conserve the texts in their original form. Known as scholiasts, they were among the first editors and scholars and literary critics; their annotations, still studied today, are often longer than the works themselves.
When I worked as a sort of scribe (which is a very hard job, by the way, nowhere near as easy as it looks, fraught with perils) in the collating department of The New Yorker, William Shawn would sometimes put an X with a circle around it in the margin of a galley proof to indicate a query that he wanted us to carry over to the next version of the piece. The query might be important, but he did not yet have enough information to address it. We scribes would circle that query in blue and set the page aside to copy onto the next day’s proof, to remind Mr. Shawn to ask the author about it. If the collator put the query directly into the piece, or if the editor tried to make a fix without being sure what the author meant, there was a danger of corrupting the text.
It is conceivable that X is the original, maybe even the aboriginal, written mark. X marks the spot, as it says on all the treasure maps. Its crossed bars create a fixed point. X is also the traditional signature of an illiterate—laboriously scratched out by a cowboy before, with his last spasm, he kicks the bucket—so it is both precise and general: anyone can sign his name with an X. It may be the most useful symbol of all. How did the Phoenicians get along without it? X equals the unknown.
IF YOU THINK GREEK is hard to read now, you should have seen it when the Greeks were just starting out. They had only the capital letters—small letters were developed in the Middle Ages, to speed up writing and save on parchment. I am reluctant to refer to the small letters as “lowercase,” because that term—as well as uppercase, for capital letters—comes from movable type and is anachronistic. Printers organized type into drawers, or cases, and kept the capitals in a higher case and reached down into a case below the upper case for the small letters; ergo lowercase. The uppercase and lowercase letters are also called by the Latinate terms majuscule and minuscule (major and minor).
Greeks did not put any spaces between the words, SOTHEREADERHADTOFIGUREOUTWHEREONEWORDLEFTOFFANDTHEOTHERBEGAN. At first, they wrote from right to left, like the Phoenicians (Hebrew is still written from right to left), but then they switched and wrote from left to right. This probably accounts for the backward orientation of some of the letters, like that aleph that went from a K to a backwards K before settling into alpha: A. For a while, they wrote in both directions: they might start out writing from left to right, and when they ran out of room they would work their way back from right to left, and then turn from left to right again. This manuscript style is called boustrophedon: bous (ox) + strophe (turn)—“as the ox turns,” referring to the way an ox and plow go back and forth across a field. The metaphor suggests some deep connection between writing and the earth.
Spacing is still controversial. Though in modern typography it is generally agreed that one space after a period is enough, there are people who would sooner have their thumbs cut off than give up their right to double-space. Copy editors can guess the age of a writer by his or her typing habits. Those who double-space after a period went to college in the late sixties, early seventies, or earlier, and used a portable typewriter that was a gift from their parents. The New Yorker, in the days of hot type, put two spaces after a period, but when word processers came in, around 1994 AD, the first thing the editorial staff learned was “one space after a period.” Wide spacing has its charms, not the least of which is that it creates jobs for people who remove the extra space.
A few other trends actually seem to be moving backward in the new millennium. For instance, audiobooks are a return to the oral tradition, and podcasts—talks, interviews, radio series— dispense with the written record completely. The codex—the book with turnable pages sewn between covers—was a great improvement over the scroll, but now, with publication online, we are back to scrolling again, which makes it hard to refer back to things. And vowels, the innovation of some god or genius, are now playfully omitted, as if they took up too much space. Someone might write “srsly” online (but not in print), creating a (sltly) humorous effect, or sign off with a distinctive “yrs” instead of the more formal “Yours.” (But no one would dare write “sncrly yrs”—the sentiment is insincere without vowels.) There is a chain of restaurants called GRK, like an abbreviation for an airport, and no one would mistake it for Gork or Grak. People know that here they can get a Greek salad (or GRK sld). A banner outside a church building in New York that was converted into a nightclub called the Limelight, and later into a mall and then a gym, floats the letters MNSTR, leaving one to choose between “monster” and “minister,” and giving no clue what goes on in the building anymore. Who among Phoenicians knew that their alphabet would one day triumph as a marketing gimmick?
Spacing is basically a negative form of punctuation, and it was a great leap forward. Actual marks in the text to help the reader were minimal—a raised dot or two were used to indicate a change of speaker in a play, and there are still arguments over whether a line in, say, the Prometheus belongs to Io or the chorus. Aristophanes of Byzantium gets the credit for using a system of dots to suggest pauses in speech. As Keith Houston recounts in Shady Characters, his book about the history of punctuation, the dot was placed in the middle of the line for a short pause (a comma), at the bottom of the line for a longer pause (a colon), and at the top for a full stop (the period). The modern Greek word for a period is teleía, related to the verb “to finish, complete, perfect.” The comma comes from the Greek word komma, meaning something cut off, a segment. Its form did not solidify until the Renaissance, when printers made sumptuous new editions of Greek works. The comma was created to prevent confusion. Punctuation has always had the reader’s welfare at heart. Ancient Greek has clues right in the words—inflections, tweaks to the spelling—that sometimes make punctuation unnecessary. But would it have killed them to put a period at the end of a sente
nce?
SOMETIMES, When I was studying Greek on New Yorker time, I’d mix up my alphabets and my dictionaries and open Webster’s when I meant to consult Liddell and Scott—the Greek-English lexicon. I’d flip to the end and be surprised to see the letter Z instead of omega. What is that doing here? I’d wonder, before remembering that I was not in Athens, ancient or modern, but in midtown Manhattan, working in American English.
I don’t mean to demean the letter Z. What would we do without it? The bees would not buzz, the zoo would close for ever, the zigzag would lose its zing. The English alphabet seems to run out at the end in a way that the Greek alphabet does not. The letter Z has the feel of an afterthought, which is exactly what it was when the Romans, who had plucked it out of the Greek alphabet in the first place, restored it by pinning it back on at the end, like a tail on the alphabetum.
In the Greek alphabet, zeta comes sixth, between epsilon and eta. Its name follows the pattern of beta, and it kicks off the pleasing sequence “zeta eta theta.” Both alphabets get a little shaky toward the end. I always have to sing the whole alphabet song to remember the sequence of the letters between QRS and XYZ. The Greek alphabet opens up after Greek Y—upsilon—and tucks in those three consonants that the Phoenician aleph bet lacked and the Greeks could not do without—phi, chi, psi (the order does not come naturally to me)—before crowning the alphabet with omega. Remember that the alphabet song, set to the same tune as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” does not actually end at the letter Z, but goes on to fill out the cadence with the rather lame “Now I know my ABC’s. Next time, won’t you sing with me.” If you were in my second-grade class, you went on to sing the alphabet backwards, proving total mastery, and maybe absorbing the fact that alphabetical order does not necessarily imply a hierarchy.