Latest / Ridiculous History / How The (English) Alphabet Became A Thing, Part Two: Each Letter Has A Story

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How The (English) Alphabet Became A Thing, Part Two: Each Letter Has A Story · Ridiculous History

0:00
Speaker 1: Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
0:28
Speaker 1: fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
0:32
Speaker 1: tuning in. This is the second part of our episode
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Speaker 1: on the weird weird story of how the modern English
0:42
Speaker 1: alphabet became a thing. So on a personal message, I
0:47
Speaker 1: owe you and sometimes why our.
0:51
Speaker 2: You owe me? We owe each other the world.
0:55
Speaker 1: Yes, it's true, and that's our super producer, mister Max Williams.
1:00
Speaker 1: That's the main man, our pal, mister Noel Brown. Helloh,
1:05
Speaker 1: they called me ben Bollen in many parts of the world.
1:08
Speaker 1: And no h for anybody who is tuning in. Now,
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Speaker 1: what did we learn in our previous exploration of the
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Speaker 1: English alphabet?
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Speaker 2: Oh? Boy, where to even start? We learned that Chaucer
1:23
Speaker 2: was a saucy boy. He liked butts and talking funny.
1:29
Speaker 2: And we learned that Max has a real talent for
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Speaker 2: voice acting. Those are my two major takeaways.
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Speaker 1: M Yeah, and those are great things to take away
1:39
Speaker 1: from the first episode and to take with us in
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Speaker 1: the second episode. Fellow Ridiculous Historians, Please, please please, if
1:49
Speaker 1: you have not listened to part one of How the
1:52
Speaker 1: English Alphabet Became a thing, We're gonna pause and give
1:57
Speaker 1: you a second to catch up before we dive into
2:00
Speaker 1: modern English. We're gonna put some mustard on this one.
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Speaker 2: Ooh yeah, indeed, hopefully spicy brown. It's my favorite kind
2:07
Speaker 2: of mustard.
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Speaker 1: You know.
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Speaker 3: And if you want to listen to the other one
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Speaker 3: after the fact, that's cool too, because we start kind
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Speaker 3: of right on modern English to Ben's point, which is
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Speaker 3: a spelling system that developed from around thirteen hundred and
2:21
Speaker 3: fifty the year onwards.
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Speaker 2: Yes, right, see. Indeed, when after three centuries of the
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Speaker 2: Norman French being in charge, English gradually became the official
2:32
Speaker 2: language of the land that is England.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, it became the official language again, right again.
2:40
Speaker 2: But it was like when New.
2:42
Speaker 1: Coke got rolled out, as a Coca Cola classic got
2:45
Speaker 1: rolled out.
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Speaker 2: It's not the same thing.
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Speaker 1: The new English language is quite different from everything that
3:00
Speaker 1: happened before about ten sixty six CE, and it incorporated
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Speaker 1: a lot of words from French origin. Later we will
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Speaker 1: call this phenomenon loan words. So, for instance, in this situation,
3:17
Speaker 1: we see French origin words shout out to the Normans,
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Speaker 1: things like battle, beef, button, et cetera. You also see
3:26
Speaker 1: it in modern English with things.
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Speaker 2: Like boondocks exactly, and I think we already know all
3:33
Speaker 2: ridiculous historians included that the printing press was kind of
3:37
Speaker 2: a big deal. I'll tell you what I didn't fully know,
3:40
Speaker 2: or if I did, I maybe only partially knew and
3:43
Speaker 2: then forgot how the printing press not only was a
3:46
Speaker 2: big deal in the proliferation of language and of modern English,
3:50
Speaker 2: but also like the words themselves, because some people got
3:54
Speaker 2: paid by the length of words, and that kind of
3:57
Speaker 2: stuck around. I thought that was really cool. We'll get
3:59
Speaker 2: to that in the sense. William Kaxton is who we're
4:02
Speaker 2: talking about today. Of course, the printing press was invented
4:06
Speaker 2: by Johann Gutenberg in fourteen forty eight, but in Great Britain,
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Speaker 2: William Kaxton was responsible for bringing this technology around in
4:14
Speaker 2: the mid fifteenth century. Oh yeah, but.
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Speaker 1: He brought it over the Channel. It was not a
4:20
Speaker 1: clean process. They found the technology, they did not yet
4:24
Speaker 1: have the uniformity or consistency of language. So when our
4:29
Speaker 1: buddy Willie brings the concept or the technology of the
4:34
Speaker 1: printing press to London, it's around fourteen seventy six, so
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Speaker 1: not too many decades after Gutenberg invents the printing press. Now,
4:44
Speaker 1: our buddy Willy at this point is in a bit
4:47
Speaker 1: of a pickle. He's been living in what we call
4:51
Speaker 1: the continent continental Europe for more than thirty years. As
4:55
Speaker 1: a result, he does not have an up to the
5:00
Speaker 1: present day grasp of the English spelling system as they
5:05
Speaker 1: would do it over the Channel. And further, he brings
5:10
Speaker 1: a bunch of his assistants from Belgium. Those guys also
5:15
Speaker 1: have no clue. They kind of freestyle what they think
5:20
Speaker 1: words should sound like.
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Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean, let's not forget. Language is its own
5:25
Speaker 2: form of technology in a way, and it sometimes requires
5:29
Speaker 2: a little bit of on the fly adjustments to make
5:32
Speaker 2: it work. So let's add to that another little hiccup.
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Speaker 2: As printing developed and then the business of printing sprang up,
5:41
Speaker 2: people started to develop a rather you know, companies organizations
5:45
Speaker 2: started to develop their own signature preferences, a term that
5:48
Speaker 2: sticks around today known as house styles, which you might
5:52
Speaker 2: hear use for different magazines, for example, or different ad agencies.
5:57
Speaker 2: They might have a house style. Then you can probably
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Speaker 2: shed a little bit more like on specifically what that means.
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Speaker 2: But my understanding is that has to do with maybe
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Speaker 2: the use of an Oxford Comma, for example, or like
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Speaker 2: how certain punctuations are used in the house style of
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Speaker 2: say Vanity Fair versus People Magazine.
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Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, it's like is this going to be a
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Speaker 1: U or a V? Right, because we're still in that
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Speaker 1: era of development. Also, I would like to point out
6:23
Speaker 1: they said house styles instead of signature styles, because no
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Speaker 1: one could agree on how best do you spell the
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Speaker 1: word signature.
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Speaker 2: And the houses in question are, of course, these printing houses.
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Speaker 2: These are literally various shops, you know, like and so
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Speaker 2: the term house styles gets taken and kind of use
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Speaker 2: for a broader sense, you know of like the signature
6:44
Speaker 2: style of a different publication or like I said, an
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Speaker 2: advertising company to refer to. It can also refer to graphics,
6:50
Speaker 2: or it can refer to color palettes or various different
6:53
Speaker 2: things like that, house styleographies two hundred percent, how to
6:56
Speaker 2: make citations, how to format footnote and things like that. Yeah.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and that gets in the weeds super easily. What
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Speaker 1: you need to know, folks, is the idea of generating
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Speaker 1: what we call modern English. While it is launched by
7:14
Speaker 1: the amazing innovation of the printing press, it is complicated
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Speaker 1: by short term economic interests of the times. As you
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Speaker 1: noted NOL these type setters at these various different non unified,
7:31
Speaker 1: not really a union at this point. These type setters
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Speaker 1: are all trying to make their own proprietary thing. And
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Speaker 1: the blokes who put the blocks in order to print
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Speaker 1: your local broadsheets, they got paid per line, so they
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Speaker 1: had a hard economic interest in making words longer because
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Speaker 1: it meant they made more money when they did.
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Speaker 2: So. I just had no idea about this detail, and
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Speaker 2: I think it's so fascinating. How areary a lot of
8:01
Speaker 2: the evolution of language tends to be. It's like holdovers
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Speaker 2: from people just making decisions that were relevant at the
8:08
Speaker 2: time for very specific and often selfish reasons, but just
8:12
Speaker 2: they just kind of stick around, like silent letters and
8:14
Speaker 2: things like that that maybe were left over from old English.
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Speaker 2: They were just say, you know, what it benefits us
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Speaker 2: to have that silent h or what have you, you know,
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Speaker 2: in the middle of the word, so let's just leave it.
8:26
Speaker 2: They were paid, like you said, by the line, that
8:28
Speaker 2: kind of modern equivalent. I guess you might think about
8:30
Speaker 2: it sort of the opposite, where if you're putting a
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Speaker 2: personals ad or an advertisement in a newspaper, you pay
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Speaker 2: by the word exactly, so you know, it behooves you
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Speaker 2: in that situation to err on the side of brevity,
8:44
Speaker 2: being the soul of wit and all of that. So
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Speaker 2: it really is a pickle, Like you said, Ben, Yeah, it's.
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Speaker 1: A real bag of badger's there because we have to
8:53
Speaker 1: exercise empathy. Imagine you're a type setter back in the
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Speaker 1: day and you say, oh, hey, most other print houses
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Speaker 1: are spelling this word something like through. For instance, they're
9:08
Speaker 1: spelling it t h R e w A. What if
9:14
Speaker 1: I spell it t h r o U g H
9:18
Speaker 1: and get a little vigoroush. Right, Who am I to
9:22
Speaker 1: argue with a greater good? It's a real bag of badgers.
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Speaker 1: The biggest changes in English spelling consistency. They occurred kind
9:33
Speaker 1: of around the sixteenth century as well, because a guy
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Speaker 1: named William Tyndale translated the New Testament in fifteen thirty nine,
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Speaker 1: a guy named Henry the Eighth. Yes, that King Henry,
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Speaker 1: he said, very well, print thy Bibles in English in England.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, a bit of a best seller. Turned out that
9:59
Speaker 2: the old New Testament, I mean, it's no Harry Potter. Well,
10:01
Speaker 2: you know, it was sort of the Harry Potter of
10:03
Speaker 2: its day. So that that led to numerous editions of
10:07
Speaker 2: these Bibles. And it wasn't until I think we this
10:09
Speaker 2: is pre King James, right, this is when, oh man,
10:14
Speaker 2: I just mean in terms of standardization like this led
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Speaker 2: to a lot of different variations in print houses because
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Speaker 2: the King Henry basically just you know, lifted whatever moratorium
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Speaker 2: might have been on printing the sacred Word of God,
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Speaker 2: and that led to folks having their own house styles,
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Speaker 2: even for something as massive as the Bible.
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Speaker 1: One hundred percent. Dude, the King James translation, it's commissioned
10:38
Speaker 1: in sixteen oh four, it doesn't get printed until sixteen eleven.
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Speaker 1: So before King James, our buddy Henry is saying, look,
10:50
Speaker 1: we need an English Bible in England because, as you said,
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Speaker 1: the differing versions or attempts to translate or commune unicate
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Speaker 1: the Christian Bible, they were all printed outside of England
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Speaker 1: by people who, and I'm not gonna be rude about this,
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Speaker 1: they spoke little to no English themselves.
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Speaker 2: You know. It reminds me of there's this band that
11:15
Speaker 2: I love, I think you're familiar with, to Ben King
11:17
Speaker 2: Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. They do this really cool
11:21
Speaker 2: thing where all of their records, of which they have
11:23
Speaker 2: a gazillion. They make the masters available to anybody who
11:27
Speaker 2: wants to make a version of it. So, like, you know,
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Speaker 2: if you are a small record printing company like LPs
11:34
Speaker 2: UH and you want to design your own version of
11:37
Speaker 2: a King Gizzard record, that is totally cool, which leads
11:41
Speaker 2: to this proliferation. Likely nigh on impossible to track down
11:45
Speaker 2: every version of their records, which is really really cool.
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Speaker 2: But obviously the records remains the same. In this case,
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Speaker 2: the actual contents were being styled on. Yeah.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's similar to while we're praising contemporaries, it's similar
12:00
Speaker 1: to how the amazing author Stephen King has what he
12:06
Speaker 1: calls dollar babies. And if you are hearing this you're
12:10
Speaker 1: an up and coming filmmaker, this is true. This is
12:14
Speaker 1: still a real thing you can do. You can write
12:17
Speaker 1: to Stephen King, or you know, more realistically, you can
12:22
Speaker 1: write to his estate and you can say, I'd like
12:25
Speaker 1: to adapt one of your stories for film, one of
12:29
Speaker 1: your short stories. They will charge you one US dollar
12:33
Speaker 1: because like King Gizzard and or The Lizard Wizard, the
12:38
Speaker 1: guy just wants the story to be out there, and
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Speaker 1: that's what people are doing with this concept of the Bible,
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Speaker 1: the story of God and Jesus Christ. A lot of
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Speaker 1: the printers who are making copies translations of the Bible,
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Speaker 1: they are Dutch, and so being Dutch, they routinely change
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Speaker 1: the spelling of a word to match what makes sense
13:05
Speaker 1: to them as Dutch speakers. And this is why we're
13:09
Speaker 1: gonna put you on the game right here, ridiculous historians.
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Speaker 1: This is why you have so many h's going after
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Speaker 1: G in English. It's not because of English. It's because
13:23
Speaker 1: of those Dutch folks who printed the Bibles. Like you,
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Speaker 1: you wouldn't say no, you wouldn't say the H after
13:32
Speaker 1: ghosts or after the G and ghosts we do. I
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Speaker 1: do have to admit we both have a lot of
13:39
Speaker 1: fun saying the H in whip.
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Speaker 2: Hip or how would you even say the agent ghost
13:44
Speaker 2: the host that just becomes another word entirely aghast a
13:50
Speaker 2: hurricane man. Actually I don't They're kind of gross. But
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Speaker 2: it's funny though, because all these silent letters. It's something
13:58
Speaker 2: that I've always scratched my head about because it does
14:01
Speaker 2: make learning English difficults. You know, people always say that
14:05
Speaker 2: English is a difficult language to learn to speak, let alone,
14:08
Speaker 2: right and it's because of a lot of these weird spellings.
14:12
Speaker 2: And obviously, of course there are weird conjugations and things
14:15
Speaker 2: like that that are not present in other languages. But
14:18
Speaker 2: I think that kind of game of telephone, that is
14:20
Speaker 2: the English language is largely what leads to that difficulty
14:24
Speaker 2: for maybe new speakers to fully wrap their heads around it,
14:27
Speaker 2: because sometimes we can't even wrap our heads around and
14:29
Speaker 2: we've been speaking since we were little children.
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Speaker 1: I'm still learning it. I wouldn't consider myself a native
14:34
Speaker 1: speaking right.
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Speaker 4: So back in the day, Europe overall, especially are good
14:42
Speaker 4: friends in England, they got all these weird spellings and
14:46
Speaker 4: they decided to let it ride.
14:48
Speaker 2: They were like, we're.
14:49
Speaker 1: Cool, what's going on with how there's sometimes a V
14:54
Speaker 1: and sometimes a you. It wasn't until the mid sixteenth
14:57
Speaker 1: century that V and you became different distinct letters. You
15:05
Speaker 1: became the vowel, V became the consonant. And it reminds
15:08
Speaker 1: me of our earlier exploration this week, where remember how
15:13
Speaker 1: we saw that the first alphabet ish thing only at consonants.
15:20
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, made it very gutturaled, and we talked about
15:23
Speaker 2: that as well, that those vowels is really what makes
15:26
Speaker 2: the kind of more flowing quality to language. So in
15:29
Speaker 2: sixteen oh four Robert Quadry published the first English Dictionary,
15:35
Speaker 2: and what's a dictionary if not an attempt to start
15:38
Speaker 2: to codify some of this stuff by placing it all
15:40
Speaker 2: in a single tome. This was called the table Alphabetical,
15:45
Speaker 2: and around this time Jay was added to create the
15:49
Speaker 2: modern English alphabet more or less that we know today
15:53
Speaker 2: more I think, right? Is it pretty much the exact one?
15:55
Speaker 2: It's closer and closer, broke. Yeah, we're getting there.
15:58
Speaker 1: We're getting We're edging toward the letters we know and love.
16:04
Speaker 1: And we see each letter has its own origin, story,
16:08
Speaker 1: its own providence and transformation over time. And this is true, folks.
16:14
Speaker 1: These individual symbols would change position, they would flip around.
16:20
Speaker 1: In some cases they got more flourishes, in other cases
16:24
Speaker 1: they lost flourishes. I propose that we just run down
16:30
Speaker 1: the list for funsies, you know, just to see how
16:35
Speaker 1: ridiculous this is, and perhaps most importantly, to recognize that
16:41
Speaker 1: no matter how static a given alphabet may appear to
16:44
Speaker 1: be in your current time, they can always change.
16:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, why don't mean to start at the beginning, huh?
16:57
Speaker 2: With the old letter A I feel like we're on's street.
17:00
Speaker 2: The original shape of the letter A was actually inverted,
17:03
Speaker 2: so it looked kind of like the head of an
17:05
Speaker 2: animal with horns and antlers. If you think about it, it
17:08
Speaker 2: kind of looks something like a deer or a bull
17:10
Speaker 2: even right. It was kind of fitting because in ancient
17:13
Speaker 2: Semitic back to episode one, of course, the kind of
17:17
Speaker 2: founders of the proto alphabet, the letter translated to ox.
17:22
Speaker 1: Yeah, logograms, right, or idiograms. In some other parts of
17:29
Speaker 1: the world. You see a drawing of an ox, of course,
17:32
Speaker 1: it means ox, and then they flip it upside down
17:35
Speaker 1: and now it's the letter A. If we go to B,
17:39
Speaker 1: the letter B is fascinating because it's borrowed from the
17:43
Speaker 1: pre existing Egyptian hieroglyphics, again logograms, and the letter was
17:49
Speaker 1: originally resting on what we call its belly. Not to
17:54
Speaker 1: anthropomorphize too much, but in its original shape, it looked
17:58
Speaker 1: like a kid's draw of a house and it had
18:02
Speaker 1: a door, and it had a roof, and it had
18:04
Speaker 1: a room and kid, you know, folks, about four thousand
18:08
Speaker 1: years ago, that symbol did not represent the sound be.
18:13
Speaker 1: It represented the idea of shelter. It was rain of
18:18
Speaker 1: a house.
18:18
Speaker 2: Well, that's really neat, Ben, because we've talked about this
18:21
Speaker 2: idea of hobo code hieroglyphs that traveling folks might use,
18:27
Speaker 2: you know, to designate certain features of towns, and you know,
18:31
Speaker 2: like routes and things like that, and a lot of
18:34
Speaker 2: those do represent do look kind of like modern day
18:36
Speaker 2: hieroglyphics orm you know, relatively modern speaking. But there's one
18:39
Speaker 2: in particular that I really dig that represents safe, uh, safe,
18:43
Speaker 2: safe haven. And it is kind of a lot like
18:46
Speaker 2: a sort of stylized B, sometimes with little eyes in
18:50
Speaker 2: the corners. So it's really neat the way this stuff
18:52
Speaker 2: kind of proliferates and changes and gets repurposed, you know,
18:56
Speaker 2: in various ways over time. So next up, obviously, next
18:59
Speaker 2: thing is next we should go to the letter C.
19:02
Speaker 2: The letter came from the Phoenicians once again, and it
19:05
Speaker 2: was shaped a lot like a boomerang or something, you know,
19:08
Speaker 2: like some sort of projectile. They had no idea what boomerang,
19:11
Speaker 2: they certainly didn't, but it was like, you know, a
19:13
Speaker 2: half moon, let's call it as well. They call it
19:16
Speaker 2: like a hunting stick. There you go. The Greeks called
19:19
Speaker 2: it Gamma, and flipped it to the direction that it's
19:21
Speaker 2: written today, with the Italians giving it a bit more
19:24
Speaker 2: of that half moon crescent shape.
19:26
Speaker 1: They curved it, they took out the they took out
19:29
Speaker 1: the point there, and this is where we get to D.
19:33
Speaker 1: Dallett is the name given to the letter D by
19:37
Speaker 1: the Phoenicians round about eight hundred BCE. It looked like
19:43
Speaker 1: at first a rough triangle, and where you see the
19:47
Speaker 1: curve shape in a written letter D in modern English,
19:51
Speaker 1: what you need to imagine is it's flipped and it's
19:54
Speaker 1: a point y D facing left. The original meaning of
19:59
Speaker 1: that that letter was door, so you would open the door.
20:05
Speaker 1: And then the Greeks adopted, again appropriated this alphabet, and
20:10
Speaker 1: they said, let's call it delta, and then they flipped it.
20:14
Speaker 1: And then the Romans are the ones who said, he,
20:18
Speaker 1: let's smooth out this point a little bit.
20:22
Speaker 2: Sure with the hands. They're doing the hand the whole time.
20:25
Speaker 2: You know the symbol I mentioned a minute ago, the
20:28
Speaker 2: hobocode for safe harbor. It also looks like a B
20:34
Speaker 2: or a V or kind of an A where the
20:37
Speaker 2: curves are removed and everything is just like a straight
20:39
Speaker 2: kind of triangular shape with much more hard edges. So
20:43
Speaker 2: moving past D, we are now of course onto E.
20:48
Speaker 2: About thirty eight hundred years ago, the letter E was
20:51
Speaker 2: pronounced more like an H sound, and that was again
20:54
Speaker 2: in the Semitic language. It looked a lot like a
20:57
Speaker 2: stick figure of a human with two arms. You can
21:00
Speaker 2: kind of still see in the modern day equivalent for
21:02
Speaker 2: some reason just had one leg, just the one, the one.
21:05
Speaker 2: And in seven hundred BCE, the Greeks, once again there
21:08
Speaker 2: are fans of the old flippity doo. They did just that,
21:11
Speaker 2: and they change the pronunciation as well to a double
21:13
Speaker 2: E sound, which I guess is like a like a
21:15
Speaker 2: just knee sound, right.
21:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So the way we would say E
21:20
Speaker 1: phonetically sounds like e.
21:23
Speaker 2: Uh.
21:24
Speaker 1: This is also fascinating because Noel the idea when you
21:29
Speaker 1: read it, the idea of an e pronounced as an
21:33
Speaker 1: h in modern English, it feels counterintuitive. But everybody join
21:39
Speaker 1: us together, say E, then say eh. Then hear that
21:43
Speaker 1: h at the end. That's where they're going.
21:46
Speaker 4: Uh.
21:47
Speaker 1: That that's the evolution of this. And this takes us
21:51
Speaker 1: to another counterintuitive pronunciation, the letter.
21:55
Speaker 2: F, one of my favorites in the whole alphabet. You
21:57
Speaker 2: love F that's what. That's your pick of it. It's
22:00
Speaker 2: got a good mouth sound. The letter F was also
22:02
Speaker 2: from the Phoenicians, and it looked much more in that iteration,
22:06
Speaker 2: like oh, why.
22:07
Speaker 1: Shout out to the Welsh because we get it. I
22:10
Speaker 1: was cracking on you guys earlier, but.
22:13
Speaker 2: I totally get it. Yeah. Then it was pronounced to
22:18
Speaker 2: make a sound kind of more like a wah like wow,
22:23
Speaker 2: kind of like Owen Wilson talks. The ancient Greeks renamed
22:27
Speaker 2: it to uh digamma, digamma, I believe, and tips it
22:31
Speaker 2: over a little bit to where it resembled more of
22:34
Speaker 2: the present day F character. The Romans then made it
22:38
Speaker 2: look even better by giving it a bit more of
22:41
Speaker 2: a stylized geometric shape and then changing the official phonetic
22:46
Speaker 2: sound to a good old yeah baby hm yeah, yeah,
22:52
Speaker 2: not a raspberry sound, just just just just a hard F.
22:54
Speaker 1: No. Yeah, you have to be careful with the placement
22:57
Speaker 1: of your tongue any humans tuning. And now we get
23:01
Speaker 1: to the letter G, which weirdly enough comes from the
23:05
Speaker 1: Zeta of the Greeks, Zeta we will call it. At first,
23:10
Speaker 1: G looked like an I that maybe hadn't been working
23:14
Speaker 1: out and the pronunciation made a zz sound. The Romans
23:22
Speaker 1: took again a lot of stuff from the Greeks, and
23:24
Speaker 1: around two point fifty BCE they said, all right, let's
23:28
Speaker 1: differentiate this. We're gonna take this regular look and I
23:33
Speaker 1: we're gonna give it a top arm, and we're gonna
23:36
Speaker 1: give it a lower arm that later starts to look
23:39
Speaker 1: kind of cradling like a hand, and we're gonna give
23:42
Speaker 1: it a good sound. Latin didn't have a z sound.
23:49
Speaker 1: So in the course of the development of the letter G,
23:53
Speaker 1: those straight lines that were originally created they become curved again.
24:00
Speaker 1: They we're seeing a rounding of things. This ends with
24:04
Speaker 1: the present current crescent shape of the capital letter G.
24:09
Speaker 1: And by the way, spoilers, folks, there's an entirely different
24:13
Speaker 1: origin story for lowercase letters.
24:16
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, we got that's a little outside of the scope,
24:18
Speaker 2: I think in this conversation, because it's sometimes I've always wondered, like,
24:22
Speaker 2: how do they get that from that? And I think
24:24
Speaker 2: that is the question overall. And Ben, this does just
24:27
Speaker 2: take a quick pause make me think of a sort
24:29
Speaker 2: of a dumb question that I've often had. How come
24:32
Speaker 2: if different countries and different cultures and different parts of
24:36
Speaker 2: the world have different alphabet systems and different languages. How
24:40
Speaker 2: come everybody agreed on the same depictions of numbers numbers Arabic? Yeah,
24:47
Speaker 2: I get it, but I also the more I think
24:48
Speaker 2: about it, the more it's like mathematics. It's a little
24:52
Speaker 2: bit more indisputable. It's sort of based on at the
24:55
Speaker 2: end of the day, like laws of nature and like,
24:57
Speaker 2: you know, things that are kind of more concrete. Language
25:01
Speaker 2: is something that's a lot easier to style on because
25:03
Speaker 2: you don't really the math doesn't for lack of a
25:05
Speaker 2: better term, have to work out in the end. So
25:08
Speaker 2: there is a lot more kind of footloose and fancy
25:11
Speaker 2: free styling when it comes to you know, what letters
25:14
Speaker 2: look like and how words fit together. Whereas math, if
25:17
Speaker 2: you kind of couldn't agree on math, and that would
25:20
Speaker 2: cause a lot of problems.
25:22
Speaker 1: Math is the underlying language of the reality in which
25:26
Speaker 1: this podcast is created, such that if you met an
25:31
Speaker 1: extra dimensional or extra terrestrial entity, your best bet in
25:36
Speaker 1: communication would be mathematic principles.
25:40
Speaker 2: That's right. So moving away from math and moving on
25:43
Speaker 2: to the letter H. This one comes from the Egyptians
25:47
Speaker 2: and was used as a symbol for a fence which
25:49
Speaker 2: you can totally see. It looks like it's right there.
25:52
Speaker 2: It looks like you got the little the two pickets
25:55
Speaker 2: I guess, and then the thing you know, holding them together,
25:57
Speaker 2: and you could just continue to string the together and
26:00
Speaker 2: surround your property to protect you from raiders or what happened.
26:06
Speaker 1: Later boffins were total digs about it. Can I says
26:10
Speaker 1: on a question?
26:11
Speaker 2: They do it?
26:12
Speaker 1: So they said, they said, look, this makes a breathy sound,
26:17
Speaker 1: an exhalation, and so they said, we find this unnecessary.
26:24
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, yeah, like a passive aggressive side. So British
26:27
Speaker 1: and Latin scholars eventually for a time dropped the letter
26:31
Speaker 1: H from the English alphabet entirely around five hundred CE.
26:37
Speaker 2: But look at it now, how far it's come. It
26:42
Speaker 2: is the comeback kid. You need the H, they said.
26:45
Speaker 1: And I don't know, we don't know if they if
26:49
Speaker 1: they credited those early Dutch printers of the Bible.
26:53
Speaker 2: Do you know how they say the letter H in
26:55
Speaker 2: the UK? How h ah yes, h h yah. Yeah,
27:00
Speaker 2: it's great, it makes perfect sense. It's a much better
27:03
Speaker 2: indication of what it sounds like. But it always takes
27:05
Speaker 2: me aback when I'm talking with British friends of mine,
27:07
Speaker 2: and they say, hey, yeah, I know why I hear
27:11
Speaker 2: a lot because in the modular synth community there's something
27:14
Speaker 2: called HP which measures how wide a module is, and
27:18
Speaker 2: so they're always saying hat HP HP.
27:22
Speaker 1: And speaking of these strange stories, folks, as you were
27:27
Speaker 1: hearing us describe the evolution of the letter G, you
27:31
Speaker 1: were probably wondering what happened to I. It's a question
27:35
Speaker 1: that a lot of people ask themselves in the dark
27:38
Speaker 1: of night. The letter I was originally back in one
27:42
Speaker 1: thousand BCE called yad and it meant hand and arm.
27:49
Speaker 1: The Greeks later called it iota and they made it vertical,
27:52
Speaker 1: so it used to be horizontal like a double hyphen
27:56
Speaker 1: and then the Greeks, you know, they're flipping house is
28:00
Speaker 1: just like reality shows on HGTV. It turned eventually into
28:06
Speaker 1: a straight line around seven hundred BCE, so G and
28:12
Speaker 1: I become distinct different sounds.
28:16
Speaker 2: It's interesting too, because you know, obviously a lot of
28:18
Speaker 2: this stuff descended from Semitic cultures that we've talked about,
28:21
Speaker 2: and I was wondering, where have I heard yawd and
28:25
Speaker 2: some of these other like alternate you know, past versions
28:28
Speaker 2: of these letters, And that's it's from Hebrew. They still
28:32
Speaker 2: exist some of these in Hebrew and yadd in the
28:34
Speaker 2: Bible is actually a symbol of the Creator, and in
28:39
Speaker 2: Jewish mysticism it's a very very important concept.
28:43
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, in Kabbala and other ancient teachings. We also,
28:50
Speaker 1: I love that you're bringing that up, because we're also
28:53
Speaker 1: going to look at the letter J, the letter the
28:56
Speaker 1: new one, right, the new boy, yeah kid, the block
29:00
Speaker 1: alphabetically on the printing press, on the printer block types
29:04
Speaker 1: that block or whatever.
29:05
Speaker 2: We'll keep it max.
29:07
Speaker 1: The letter I used to be a stand in for
29:11
Speaker 1: the sound in ancient times, and it got its shape
29:16
Speaker 1: around the fourteen hundreds as a contribution of the Spanish language.
29:22
Speaker 1: It wasn't until about sixteen forty when the letter J
29:27
Speaker 1: regularly appeared in print. And I want to give a
29:30
Speaker 1: shout out to all our fellow Espanol speakers. The best
29:36
Speaker 1: way to say ha ha ha in internet discourse is jajaja.
29:44
Speaker 2: What I didn't know that. I'm gonna start pulling that
29:46
Speaker 2: one out in my internet correspondence. Moving on to the
29:50
Speaker 2: letter K. Another favorites good sound, good heart sound. When
29:54
Speaker 2: paired with F. You know, you got to lead with
29:56
Speaker 2: an F and then with a K. That's a fun word.
29:59
Speaker 2: It's an old lest and it comes from the Egyptian
30:01
Speaker 2: hieroglyphics system as well. In the Semitic language we were
30:05
Speaker 2: just talking about giving credit to. It was given the
30:08
Speaker 2: name kuff, which translates to palm of the hand. Yeah, exactly.
30:13
Speaker 2: And what Ben's doing his hand right now, He's doing
30:15
Speaker 2: a little flippy two of his hand. And in those times,
30:17
Speaker 2: the letter faced once again the other way, and when
30:20
Speaker 2: the Greeks adopted an eight hundred BCE, it became kappa.
30:23
Speaker 2: A lot of these these these words might be familiar
30:25
Speaker 2: to any uh, you know, any folks out there in
30:29
Speaker 2: fraternities or sororities, of course. And they also then flipped
30:32
Speaker 2: it to the rights.
30:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if we move on, you know what, I
30:38
Speaker 1: don't want anybody to take an L here, ah, So
30:44
Speaker 1: let's explore it together. The present day letter L was
30:55
Speaker 1: once upon a time what we would call upside down,
30:58
Speaker 1: so it looked like a hooked letter, almost like the
31:03
Speaker 1: way you would draw the old Hangman game.
31:05
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, the gallows, Yes, sir.
31:08
Speaker 1: It was already called L, which meant, you know, God,
31:12
Speaker 1: the unnameable, the holy, and the Phoenicians said, all right,
31:16
Speaker 1: first off, we're going to face this hook the other way.
31:19
Speaker 1: They flipped it. They made it such that the hook
31:22
Speaker 1: was facing left. They straightened the hook a bit. They
31:25
Speaker 1: changed the name to lamed. And this was entirely just
31:30
Speaker 1: like the earlier story with a boomerang or a hunting stick,
31:34
Speaker 1: this was a goat prae. This was meant to beat
31:37
Speaker 1: the snot out of goats.
31:39
Speaker 2: Right, and then those eventually evolved into the electric versions
31:42
Speaker 2: that we know today. I just I can't get over.
31:45
Speaker 2: I mean, maybe this is just obvious to everybody but me,
31:47
Speaker 2: but like, no, it's a little obvious to me too,
31:49
Speaker 2: But just how so much of this stuff is just
31:52
Speaker 2: a product of somebody making a decision in the moment
31:54
Speaker 2: because it seemed like more aesthetically pleasing, you know, I
31:59
Speaker 2: would are you also? It might be.
32:02
Speaker 1: It might be one of two factors. Either you have
32:06
Speaker 1: a need to make your mark upon the world, make
32:10
Speaker 1: your mark literally alphabets, or there was something more convenient
32:16
Speaker 1: or more cost effective to do in terms of time.
32:20
Speaker 1: And then a later civilization comes along, just like the
32:23
Speaker 1: Greeks with the letter L, they call this stuff lambda,
32:27
Speaker 1: and they turn it around again now it faces right
32:30
Speaker 1: the final look of what we call the letter L today,
32:35
Speaker 1: the one with the straight foot at a right angle,
32:39
Speaker 1: that comes to us from the Romans.
32:42
Speaker 2: And yeah, which makes sense, I mean, because it's like
32:44
Speaker 2: it's also like the most quintessential version of the L
32:47
Speaker 2: I think we all think of and we're picturing it
32:49
Speaker 2: is in that times new Roman fun the seraph being
32:54
Speaker 2: the little the little uh what do you call it,
32:56
Speaker 2: kind of flourish on the end of the footalk about it.
33:00
Speaker 2: And also, I mean it really resembles kind of like
33:02
Speaker 2: a Roman numeral in a way too. Moving on next,
33:07
Speaker 2: back to the Egyptians, we've got the letter M. The
33:10
Speaker 2: origin of M was kind of of the wavy vertical
33:13
Speaker 2: lines with five peaks that would symbolize water at least
33:17
Speaker 2: if you're Egyptians at least. Yeah, we're back with the
33:20
Speaker 2: Egyptians again. In eighteen hundred BCE, the Semites simplified the
33:24
Speaker 2: design a little bit, reduced it to three waves, and
33:28
Speaker 2: then the Phoenicians removed one more of the waves, so
33:31
Speaker 2: by eight hundred BCE the peaks were turned into zigzags
33:34
Speaker 2: and then flipped horizontally to form what we know and
33:36
Speaker 2: love today as the letter M.
33:41
Speaker 1: And that's why I was saying, we're getting into it
33:45
Speaker 1: right over my head, budd We could do it for
33:49
Speaker 1: the letter N, which is believe it or not, folks,
33:52
Speaker 1: another Egyptian symbol. It originally looked like a small ripple
33:58
Speaker 1: atop a larger ripple. It did not stand for water,
34:02
Speaker 1: but it stood for something. Old fans of animals will
34:07
Speaker 1: recognize our very fluid reptilian friends, the serpent, the snake,
34:13
Speaker 1: the cobra. It was given the sound by ancient Semites,
34:18
Speaker 1: and they said, you know, scales, this means fish.
34:22
Speaker 2: To us quo, I mean fish is a lot less scary.
34:24
Speaker 2: I bet some people with with snake phobias might have
34:27
Speaker 2: been spooked by that original version. I'm more frightened by
34:30
Speaker 2: big fish than yeah, I guess that's true. So around
34:35
Speaker 2: one thousand BCE, just one ripple appeared, and the Greeks
34:39
Speaker 2: decided in their infinite wisdom to name it new Oh
34:43
Speaker 2: and you like new metal, Oh, amazing genre from the
34:48
Speaker 2: two thousands oh.
34:50
Speaker 1: Letter that also came from the Egyptians as well. Originally,
34:54
Speaker 1: all right, this makes sense to everyone. It was called
34:57
Speaker 1: I the Egyptians and Iron Uh for the Semites. Pardon
35:02
Speaker 1: the pronunciation.
35:02
Speaker 2: There.
35:03
Speaker 1: The Phoenicians took that hieroglyphic, that logogram, they further reduced
35:07
Speaker 1: it and they just left the outline of the pupil.
35:12
Speaker 1: So that is why the why we'll get to it.
35:16
Speaker 1: That is why the oh became the sound it is
35:21
Speaker 1: now instead of the eye. But originally it represented someone
35:25
Speaker 1: looking at you.
35:26
Speaker 2: Oh, exactly, yeah, uh huh. So moving on to P.
35:31
Speaker 2: In the ancient Semitic language, today's letter P looked a
35:34
Speaker 2: lot more like an inverted V. It was pronounced P
35:38
Speaker 2: or pay maybe I think P, which meant mouth, and
35:41
Speaker 2: the Phoenicians turned its top into a diagonal hook shape,
35:45
Speaker 2: then into hundred BCE. The Romans, once again with their
35:48
Speaker 2: there once again flipped crazy. These Romans flipped it to
35:51
Speaker 2: the right and closed the loop to form the P,
35:54
Speaker 2: the capital P that we know today.
35:57
Speaker 1: Ooh, and now we're getting into the deep water. It's
36:00
Speaker 1: just like if you are a student of the periodic
36:05
Speaker 1: table in science. I noticed that at the end you
36:09
Speaker 1: get to the real weird ones. This is the end
36:12
Speaker 1: of the alphabet here.
36:15
Speaker 2: I love this stuff.
36:16
Speaker 1: We'll keep it brief so that our producer Max does
36:20
Speaker 1: not kill us. Q. The original sound of the letter
36:24
Speaker 1: Q was like, help.
36:25
Speaker 2: Me with this. When they'll quaff quote boy quoth, let's
36:31
Speaker 2: see quoth. Maybe I don't know, there's not It's hard
36:34
Speaker 2: to say because again we've got these silent letters sometimes
36:37
Speaker 2: that make a wah or an o sound. I'm gonna
36:40
Speaker 2: go with kof maybe even. But yeah, who are we
36:44
Speaker 2: to say?
36:44
Speaker 1: If you have a Maryland accent, you would say queve uh.
36:49
Speaker 1: This translates to a ball of wool or weirdly enough,
36:53
Speaker 1: a monkey. It was originally a circle that was traversed
36:57
Speaker 1: by a vertical line in inscriptions. Around five hundred and
37:02
Speaker 1: twenty BCE, the letter started to appear as we know
37:06
Speaker 1: it today. Now we got to get to our buddy,
37:11
Speaker 1: the letter R.
37:12
Speaker 2: Yes, indeed, the letter are. The profile of a human
37:18
Speaker 2: facing left was originally the concept behind the letter R
37:22
Speaker 2: as written by the Semites. Once again, it was pronounced
37:25
Speaker 2: at that point rash, which meant head. The Romans once
37:30
Speaker 2: again turned it to the right. Yeah, no way, Yeah,
37:33
Speaker 2: they did it. They did it, those rascally Romans. And
37:35
Speaker 2: they added an inclined foot so that kind of slanted
37:39
Speaker 2: little little guy sticking his little foot out almost like
37:42
Speaker 2: in a little I don't know, pirouette kind of gesture.
37:45
Speaker 2: He said it in these das, it's like he's put
37:48
Speaker 2: poking his leg out of his showing a little leg
37:49
Speaker 2: out from under the skirt. There it is, look at
37:51
Speaker 2: those gams.
37:53
Speaker 1: We also want to move to the letter S. R.
37:58
Speaker 1: Palinol mentioned earlier the origin or evolution of the W.
38:04
Speaker 1: The letter S used to look like a horizontal W,
38:08
Speaker 1: but kind of wavy. It was supposed to mean the
38:11
Speaker 1: bow of an archer. The angular nature of the shape
38:15
Speaker 1: comes from the Phoenicians. They gave it the name ship
38:19
Speaker 1: and in their language that translated to tooth. You're not
38:24
Speaker 1: gonna believe it, folks. The Romans flipped it.
38:28
Speaker 2: How could they? Right? Unprecedented Romans, they're just flipping willy
38:34
Speaker 2: and or nilly.
38:35
Speaker 4: Yeah.
38:35
Speaker 1: They named it sigma. A lot of flippy doo on
38:39
Speaker 1: their side, and.
38:40
Speaker 2: The gen Alpha kids love the sigma. Oh gosh, Ohio
38:46
Speaker 2: shut up.
38:47
Speaker 4: Uh.
38:48
Speaker 1: The ancient Semites use the lower case form of the
38:52
Speaker 1: letter T that you see today today.
38:55
Speaker 2: Uh.
38:56
Speaker 1: They called it tall, and the way that they would
39:00
Speaker 1: announced it would sound like T, like golf T when
39:05
Speaker 1: they spoke it aloud. The Greeks didn't know what was
39:08
Speaker 1: going on, so they called it Tao, and they added
39:11
Speaker 1: the cross at the top of the letter when it's
39:14
Speaker 1: in capital form because they didn't want people to get
39:17
Speaker 1: it confused with the letter X.
39:20
Speaker 2: Moving on to the letter you and the numeral too.
39:23
Speaker 2: For any negative land fans out there, the letter you
39:27
Speaker 2: initially looked like why in one thousand BCE, and at
39:30
Speaker 2: that time it was called wow. It was the wow
39:34
Speaker 2: at that point that meant peg, because of course it didn't.
39:38
Speaker 2: Under the Greeks, it was called oopsilon big oops.
39:44
Speaker 1: So now we get to again, we're getting to the
39:46
Speaker 1: weird stuff at the end of the alphabet. The Romans
39:49
Speaker 1: in their day, they used the letter V and you interchangeably.
39:54
Speaker 1: This is part of why in episode one we said
39:57
Speaker 1: V is a weird case study. The distinction between V
40:02
Speaker 1: and other letters didn't start to appear until around the
40:06
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred, so that's pretty recent in the grand scheme
40:09
Speaker 1: of things. And this is where we get to a
40:13
Speaker 1: great note of appreciation for all the folks who figured
40:17
Speaker 1: out this alphabet beforehand. We could not be able to
40:22
Speaker 1: pronounce the name of our super producer, Max Williams without
40:27
Speaker 1: the work of the scribes of Charlemagne.
40:31
Speaker 2: Indeed, and now we're finally getting that W. Ben. We
40:35
Speaker 2: took an L earlier, and now we are going for
40:38
Speaker 2: the W, which is also pretty recent because, as you
40:41
Speaker 2: can imagine, ridiculous historians, it sort of says what it is,
40:45
Speaker 2: it doesn't it. It sort of tells you exactly what
40:47
Speaker 2: it is. It's like to u's side by side, thanks
40:50
Speaker 2: to the scribes of Charlemagne. To your point, Ben, the
40:53
Speaker 2: letter W started during the Middle Ages. It was initially
40:57
Speaker 2: represented with two u's next to one another, separated by
41:00
Speaker 2: a space at the time, like in emoji. Like just
41:04
Speaker 2: so we're going to get to a little bit of
41:05
Speaker 2: emoji talk at the end here too. At the time
41:08
Speaker 2: the sound was a little bit closer to what we
41:10
Speaker 2: might think of as a V sound, and the letter
41:13
Speaker 2: then began to appear in print as a brand new
41:16
Speaker 2: unique letter W like we know the W in seventeen hundred.
41:21
Speaker 1: Seventeen hundred Common Era AD. This is where we get
41:26
Speaker 1: to also, of course, X, the letter SI of the
41:30
Speaker 1: ancient Greeks. The lowercase version was seen in handwritten manuscripts
41:36
Speaker 1: during medieval times. Not the restaurant my favorite checked it
41:41
Speaker 1: all right, I just know it from the cable guy.
41:43
Speaker 2: It's fun.
41:44
Speaker 1: We should we should take absolutely it'll be ironically fun.
41:49
Speaker 1: And there's a bunch of printers in the late fourteen hundreds,
41:54
Speaker 1: guys in Italy. They're using lowercase x's, And now I
41:59
Speaker 1: would argue it is an integral part of every SoundCloud
42:03
Speaker 1: rapper's MC name.
42:04
Speaker 2: Not to mention, man, you pronounced that SI version with
42:08
Speaker 2: the silent k on paper, it's KSI, and I kind
42:12
Speaker 2: of wonder speaking of SoundCloud rapper types. I don't know
42:14
Speaker 2: if you're familiar with this somewhat problematic YouTuber named KSI,
42:20
Speaker 2: whose buddies with Jake Paul and all those rabbele rousers.
42:23
Speaker 2: A bunch of bunch of kind of heels they are.
42:26
Speaker 2: But he recently became the subject of some serious Internet
42:30
Speaker 2: roasting with his new SoundCloud rapper esque song called in
42:34
Speaker 2: the Thick of It, where he says something to the
42:36
Speaker 2: effect of from the screen to the ring to the
42:39
Speaker 2: pen to the king, something something something something that my bling.
42:43
Speaker 2: You know, it's really really embarrassing. It sounds like a
42:45
Speaker 2: backyard against theme song. So I hope that guy's doing okay.
42:47
Speaker 2: He got pretty roasted and he just did the thing
42:49
Speaker 2: you're not supposed to do where he just kept answering
42:52
Speaker 2: the roasts and doubling down and then calling those people
42:54
Speaker 2: big ol' meanies, and that they just didn't understand his genius.
42:57
Speaker 2: So are the songs good?
42:59
Speaker 1: No?
42:59
Speaker 2: No, ks I, I hope you're okay. Here's to the
43:04
Speaker 2: here's to the next song.
43:05
Speaker 1: But you know, there's always an opportunity, right, Everything has
43:10
Speaker 1: a future, especially the letter why we mentioned this, you're right,
43:16
Speaker 1: started out as upsilon or upsilon. It was added by
43:20
Speaker 1: the Romans one ce. Now we got to go to
43:24
Speaker 1: z Phoenicians back in the day again, as you can tell,
43:29
Speaker 1: ridiculous historians, they were a big deal.
43:31
Speaker 2: They had a letter.
43:32
Speaker 1: Called Zion and it meant acts z A Y I N.
43:37
Speaker 1: We would spell it phonetically now phoenicianally now uh. It
43:42
Speaker 1: first looked like the letter I, and it just had
43:44
Speaker 1: some fancy flourishes, some seraphs at the top and bottom,
43:48
Speaker 1: little daily bops. The Greeks adopted it as zeta and
43:53
Speaker 1: they gave it the sound yeah zip yeah, and it
44:00
Speaker 1: was it used for several centuries until the Normans invaded
44:07
Speaker 1: what we call the United Kingdom today and they said, hey,
44:11
Speaker 1: we have a language that needs the sound of the
44:14
Speaker 1: letter or needs the sound, and that's how we got Z.
44:19
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, and that's how we wrap up this discussion
44:23
Speaker 2: of the English alphabet. Man I kind of teased that, Ben,
44:26
Speaker 2: so I don't want to leave the folks at home
44:28
Speaker 2: without a dope beat to steps up too. We just
44:30
Speaker 2: talked about a little bit briefly just how so many
44:32
Speaker 2: of these things were derived initially from kind of emoji
44:37
Speaker 2: like symbols and then kind of came to be repurposed
44:40
Speaker 2: as phonetic sounds. We have whole cultures that use symbols
44:44
Speaker 2: to represent concepts, and Ben, you pointed out in your
44:47
Speaker 2: incredible outline here, and I completely agree that it feels
44:50
Speaker 2: as though we might be heading towards the future where
44:54
Speaker 2: the written word is kind of continuing to be dumbed
44:57
Speaker 2: down and may well be going the way of the
45:00
Speaker 2: dinosaurs in favor of emojis, which honestly, there's a benefit
45:05
Speaker 2: there because they are universally understandable and there is dictated,
45:09
Speaker 2: I guess by the powers that be at Apple, sort
45:11
Speaker 2: of an emoji alphabet. They decide which ones go in,
45:14
Speaker 2: which ones don't, and which new ones get added. And
45:17
Speaker 2: I've always wonder what the politics of that is. It's
45:19
Speaker 2: got to be fascinating.
45:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, many variables evolved. Now, First, good news for every
45:25
Speaker 1: writer and ardent reader in the crowd. The written word
45:30
Speaker 1: never goes away. It may evolve over time, however, the
45:36
Speaker 1: horse has left the barn. As far as human communication goes,
45:40
Speaker 1: Emoji are simple drawings pictures of anything you might imagine,
45:45
Speaker 1: often used in place of words written in different alphabets
45:50
Speaker 1: to convey ideas. Visually, everything we said about writing holds
45:54
Speaker 1: true for emojis. Again, name check to or shout out
45:58
Speaker 1: to Episode one. Entire novels have been written in emoji
46:04
Speaker 1: as we speak, So it is not impossible to imagine
46:07
Speaker 1: a world wherein these symbols become their own kind of language.
46:12
Speaker 1: And the beautiful thing about this, the beautiful thing about
46:15
Speaker 1: the human experiment, is that this could unify people, right,
46:20
Speaker 1: could reduce friction and conversation. Someone who is a native
46:24
Speaker 1: Mandarin speaker or someone who is speaking Cantonese, they can
46:29
Speaker 1: interact with someone who speaks English just through emojis. Now,
46:34
Speaker 1: they're gonna miss a lot of nuance.
46:36
Speaker 2: Sure, it's what I mean.
46:38
Speaker 5: We're not really living in a time of great nuance,
46:41
Speaker 5: though I would argue you unfortunately things are a little
46:44
Speaker 5: bit more of a blunt instrument in terms of language,
46:48
Speaker 5: you know, for better or for worse, though, it is
46:50
Speaker 5: another evolution and whether you're on board with it or not,
46:53
Speaker 5: it is something that's fascinating to track.
46:55
Speaker 1: And with this we thank you, fellow Ridiculous Historian, so
47:00
Speaker 1: much as always for tuning in. We're at the end
47:03
Speaker 1: of the calendar year, as the humans call it. Shout
47:06
Speaker 1: out to our super producer, mister Max Williams.
47:08
Speaker 2: Max the Phoenician Williams. That's his gangster name. Huge thanks
47:12
Speaker 2: to you is Chris Fraciota's names Jeff Coates here in spirits.
47:16
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, who composed this bang and track our fellow
47:20
Speaker 1: rude dudes over at Ridiculous Crime. Check out their show.
47:24
Speaker 1: If you like us, you'll love them.
47:26
Speaker 2: Indeed, did we say Alex Williams to compose our theme?
47:30
Speaker 2: We did? Okay, Well, that's so she's so rad We
47:33
Speaker 2: said it twice. That isn't rhyme, but that's okay. Thanks
47:36
Speaker 2: to you, Ben for putting together this incredible two parter
47:38
Speaker 2: on the history of the English language. That's no small feat.
47:41
Speaker 1: And you did it with Flair, Hey Noel, and also
47:44
Speaker 1: with you, I owe you and sometimes why I saved
47:48
Speaker 1: that joke for way too long.
47:50
Speaker 2: I think we made it at the very top. I
47:51
Speaker 2: said we owe each other in fact, get it. Yeah,
47:55
Speaker 2: I'm doing a vowel joke. Aha. I see, We'll circle.
47:58
Speaker 2: I love it. We'll see you next time, folks. For
48:07
Speaker 2: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
48:10
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,