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Ben Franklin Tried To Reinvent the Alphabet · Ridiculous History

• 0:23
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the show, Friends and neighbors. My favorite letter
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: of the English alphabet is Z, and my name is Ben,
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: my name is Noel, and I my favorite song is
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: the ABC song and uh. For the purposes of today's episode,
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: it goes like this, A B D E, F G
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: H I, K L, M N O, P R S
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: t U V z APP. I don't know how to
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: pronounce these characters. Think of characters, right, Ben Franklin, boy,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: and also Noel, you laughed at me. We were hanging
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: out yesterday and I tried singing that song with this uh. Folks,
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: you may notice that in the rendition of the alphabet
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: song you just heard, there were some prominent letters missing.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: And it turns out that's not an accident. This was
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: on purpose. You see. There was a fellow, a founding
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: father named Benjamin Franklin who did many, many things right.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: He was a renaissance man. He was Polly Maath of sorts,
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: a genius. Most people consider him um an elder statesman
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: and as you say, founding father, but also an inventor,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: a scientist, a postmaster, and a diplomat. And he just
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: kind of did all the things. And today he is
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: um sort of an American legend, and there are a
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: lot of stories about the guy that turn out later
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: not to be entirely true, you know, but it is
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: true that he was a prolific renaissance man. As an inventor.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: He created things like by vocals, he created the lightning rod,
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: He created us some swimming flippers, sets for hands, flexible catheters,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: which is weird that there was a time when they
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: were inflexible catheters, I know, and the ode dometer. But
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: one of the things that people might not know about
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: Benjamin Franklin is that in addition to inventing things, he
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: also improved a lot of things, or tempted to. And
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: one of the things that he attempted to improve was
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: the English language itself. Yeah, and it's like, you know,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: we we all know that odometers are around still, swimming
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: flippers are around, still, bifocals, no one's really made them
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: much better than than than old Ben Franklin. But you know,
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: we don't really hear much about a redone English alphabet
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: that that sticks around to this day, and that's because
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: it was a bit of a flop. But before we
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: get into its ridiculous, abysmal failure, let's talk a little
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: bit about what this thing was. Ben, absolutely no, do
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: you recall hooked on Phonics? Were hooked on filens kid?
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: It worked for me? There we go. Yeah, Hooked on
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: Phonics was this program in the US, at least in
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: the US, possibly in other places. Uh, that taught children
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: how to pronounce letters and combinations of letters in English
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: based on sounding them out. It worked so well for me, though,
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: that I ended up in phonics rehab. Oh yeah, you
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: had to. I had a problem. I had a real
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: phonics problem. Monkey on my back. But I'm cool now. Yeah. Yeah,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: I don't pronounce anything correctly. It's one day at a time, right.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: So Ben Franklin invented a phonetic alphabet. He did successfully
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: invent this. He hoped that other people would be fans
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: of the invention and that this alphabet would ultimately replace
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: the alphabet we used today, and he started by removing letters.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: He did um. Franklin's alphabet basically acted six letters, and
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: those were C, J Q, double you, X, and Y.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: You'll notice they were missing from my little alphabet ditty
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: at the beginning of the show because he thought they
• 4:06
  Speaker 1: were redundant. Right. He argued that For example, the letter
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: K could handle the hard C sounds, so no need
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: for C. You can use okay for that. And then
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: the letter S could give a soft C sound, so
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: C was gone. Um. And then he also added six
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: more characters, which, for for my money, we are unpronounceable.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: When you see them, they look like something out of
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: the necronomicon UM, but they were pretty functional um. From
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: Franklin's perspective. There were basically two vowels and four new consonants,
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: and his idea was to add clarity in pronunciation, and
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: his characters were specifically based around sounds. So, for example,
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: he had a new consonant that made the en g
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: sound um at the end of like running or or
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: or reaping or seeking. Right, Yeah, you can see you
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: can see the gist or the simplification, or at least
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: the well intentioned steps towards simplification. Franklin worked on this
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: for a long time. He initially developed the alphabet in
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: seventeen sixty eight, but he didn't start publishing it or
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: or floating it around until a little more than ten
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: years later in seventeen seventy nine. UM. He also published
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: some letters that he had written in this language, and
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: in seventeen eighty nine, Noah Webster, who had heard of
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: Franklin's proposal, included a description of it in his book
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: Dissertations on the English Language. However, there was a problem. Webster,
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: you see, did not have the correct type blocks because
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: at the time they had to use blocks, handcut blocks
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: for printing presses, and he couldn't really describe the alphabet.
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: Webster couldn't because he didn't have those special six characters
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: cut out in a block, so he couldn't really illustrate
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: Franklin's changes, and the alphabet itself really didn't you know.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: People didn't get it or see it in action until
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: Franklin had new blocks cast to print the alphabet for
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: his seventeen seventy nine collection called Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: It's interesting too, because Webster was one of the very
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: very few uh supporters of this new alphabet UM, because
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: he was all about UM standardizing American spelling, and this
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: was a big thing for Franklin too. He argued that
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: his alphabet would help people spell better, would would reduce
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: spelling errors. UM. And it's interesting there are a few
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: letters that Franklin exchanged with his friend and confidante, Polly Stevenson,
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: who was the daughter of his landlady in London. And
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: you know he gave her away at her wedding, and
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: it was a very important person in his life. And
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: she had some interesting objections to UM this new alphabet,
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: and here Um Franklin responds to a few of them. Um,
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: I give you a quote from this letter. Here. The
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: objection you make to rectifying our alphabet, that it will
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: be attended with inconveniences and difficulties, is a natural one,
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: for always occurs when any reformation is proposed, whether in religion,
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: government laws, and even down as low as roads and
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: wheel carriages. The true question then is not whether there
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: will be no difficulties or inconveniences, but whether the conveniences
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: will not, on the whole, be greater than the inconveniences.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: So you know, the whole making Omelet you gotta break
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: a few eggs argument right right. It's asking people a
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: lot to change the way that they speak and write.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: Because if you've ever looked into um an Encyclopedia entry
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: and you've seen the pronounce ciation guide, you know where
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: they have the strange characters and tell you this is
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: a glottal sound is yeah, yeah, the unstressed central vale
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: build upside downy in the International Phonetic Alphabet. When when
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: you see that, you can if you're not familiar with
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: pronunciation guides, then you can kind of get a sense
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: of how someone would feel reading a letter in Ben
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Franklin English versus you know English English totally. And when
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: you read some of these exerts that he wrote in
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: this alphabet, your brain kind of has to kind of
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: like do a some gymnastics to even parse that file.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: And once it does, it does kind of click for you.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: It's really interesting the way you can make that leap.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: But another interesting criticism from Franklin's friend Polly Stevenson was
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: the idea that changing the language would obscure etymology of
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: words and their meaning. Uh and Franklin could not disagree more.
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: His response was this, um, etymologies are at present very uncertain,
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: but such as they are, the old books would still
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: preserve them, an etymologists would there find them. Words in
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: the course of time change their meaning as well as
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: their spelling and pronunciation, and we do not look to
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: etymology for their present meanings. Um. So he really had
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: a deep philosophical belief that this was the right thing
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: to do. And it's interesting because, you know, we talked
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: about at the top of the show what a renaissance
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: man Franklin was and all the things he invented. But
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: one of his biographers kind of referred to this whole
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: exercise as taking Franklin's passion for social improvement to radical
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: extremes right. And one of the reasons that he did
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: find some prominent supporters is because there was an ideological
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: and political aspect to the generation of this language, or
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: the revision of the language from across the Atlantic. In
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: his Peace in seventeen eighty nine, Noah Webster argues, the
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: following cheval circumstances render future separation of the American tongue
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: from the English necessary and unavoidable. I'm doing a Webster voice.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: Numerous slibrical causes, such as a new country, new associations
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: of people, new combinations of ideas and arts and science,
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: introduce new words to the American tongue. So he was
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: arguing that Ben Franklin's concept was timely and prescient, and
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: that American English would need to have the opportunity to
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: become its own thing. And we do see, we do
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: see different versions of the English language dividing, you know,
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: at least in terms of slang or figures of speech.
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: But this idea was radical. This, this idea was paving
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: the way for a written version of American English to
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: be unintelligible to another English speaker. And to Franklin, language
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: um was speech before writing. And then in a lot
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: of ways, writing was sort of an inconvenient byproduct of language.
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: It was just like a thing you had to do
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: to preserve stories and data and such. But it was
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: ultimately a byproduct and not the first and foremost concern
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: to Franklin, at least right. Another quote from one of
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: these letters to Polly Stevenson addressed her third objection, which
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: was that all books already written would become useless. And
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: you know to that, and I agree with this Franklin response.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: This inconvenience would only come on gradually in a course
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: of ages, Um, you and other now living readers would
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: hardly forget the use of them. People would long learn
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: to read the old writings though they practiced the new.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: And the inconvenience is not greater than what has actually
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: happened in a similar case in Italy. And you know
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: that's been formally Italians spoken wrote in Latin. Doesn't mean
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: that they burned all the books that were in Latin.
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: They're still even today around here people that speak Latin
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: and that do translations. And translations becomes a very important
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: thing because you know, you have to know the original
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: language and the context and be able to translate the
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: nuances of it. Um. So you know, I mean to
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: say that to reinvent a language is inherently bad, I
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: think as false agreed, especially if it is a living language.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: A living language is defined as a language that has
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: living native speakers. And you know, we we know that
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: there are dead languages in the world unfortunately throughout history.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: And we can see the written evidence of these languages.
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: I can hear them, reference to read them referenced in
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: other works of the same rough historical era. But we
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: don't know for sure how these sounded languages change over time.
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: One of my favorite things about American English is that
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: anything can be a verb. Anything could be a verb.
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: You just uh, just name something and then add I
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: n G and now it's a verba. Let's see walling.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: You know, Ben Bullen ing Noel Brown ning, Yeah, exactly,
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Noel Brown ending Noel Brown to the brown ing. Yeah,
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: I think I think I added an extra syllable there.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: But you know what, we're going to keep it. And
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: as ambitious as it might sound, you and I were
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: talking off air about the kind of chuts. But someone
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: would have to have to see there you go yecause
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: I would say hotspot living language of my friend's. So
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: how irritated does someone have to be by what is
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: essentially a tomato tomato argument? Uh? To say, I am
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: going to change the entire language. Everyone who's already speaking
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: this needs to conform to my expectations of what language
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: would be. There's a really interesting thing that happens. At
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: some point when most people are learning the basics of
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: a new language, there will typically be a moment where
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: they say, well, why do you do it that way?
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: That's dumb? Why Why does um? Why does every now
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: and have to have a gender attached to it or
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: something like that, And the answer is, because that's the language.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: That's the way this language works, and it can feel,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: it can feel kind of um. I don't know if
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: it's condescending or if it'sself centered for someone learning the
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: language to tell everybody else already speaking it that they're
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: doing it wrong and they should change for one person.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: I think it's interesting too that one of Franklin's big
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: concerns in doing this alphabet was to eliminate spelling errors,
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: which I find utterly pedantic, you know, and absurd, because
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: again it's like, you know, if you're a purist, okay,
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: that's fine. If if you're a stickler for the spelling,
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: I get that, But ultimately, you know, what someone saying,
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: if the communication is successful, isn't a successful is it?
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: Isn't that what matters the most? And in fact, um,
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: you know, Webster actually persisted in published books, as you said,
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: using um a sort of adapted orthography that was I
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: believe it was not exactly Franklin's, but he sort of
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: used that as a jumping off point and developed something
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: of his own. And he was ridiculed by critics. And this,
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: this uh new language was called unsightly um and and
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: corrupting bastardization of the the proper English language. And that's
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: you know, that's another question, right, at what point is
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: it evolution? And at what point is it devolution. You know,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: at what point are they deluding or ruining a language
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: versus improving, Because one alphabet entrepreneurs improvement is another alphabet entrepreneurs,
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: you know, downfall. They see it as the ruination of language.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: And Noah Webster did succeed in creating an American spelling
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: but he did also eventually walk away from alphabet reform,
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: which he saw is a bit too radical. And it
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: turns out he was absolutely on the money about the
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: importance of political identity or you know, and in language.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: And we see this happening in other countries as well.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: There was a cool article in the Atlantic monthly magazine
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: uh In that talked about how alphabet shifts became common
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: in times of instability and former Soviet republics, for instance,
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: Alphabet shifts became so common that people started calling the
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: phenomenon new alphabet disease. So, you know, Azerbaijan is probably
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: the most famous example. They've changed the alphabet three times,
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: the whole thing. That's insane in the last hundred years.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: How could you keep up Okay, hundred years, I guess
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: you got time to learn it. But even still that
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: seems very extreme because, like you said, it's so tied
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: to national identity, which I think is probably the main
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: reason that this this exercise from Mr Franklin just totally
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: fell flat. And he, you know, I'm getting this sensinel
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: that he was very much a spaghetti at the wall
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: kind of guy. He had stuff, he came up with,
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: he had idea, he just went for it. Did you
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: know that he even suggested that the eagle was not
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: an appropriate icon for America and that it should instead
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: be the turkey. Yes, yeah, the turkey, which I think
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: he said was a proud bird exactly. He said it
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: was a that the eagle was a bird of bad
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: moral character. So you out. Franklin was also a bit
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: of a troll, which I love, you know. But it's
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: like this whole alphabet thing. When you look at it
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: from an academic perspective and from the mind of a
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: brilliant thinker like Ben Franklin, you could see how maybe
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: he would think this was a good idea, but in
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: practice it's just too much of a pain in the ass,
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: right right it is. The people are very sensitive about language,
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: especially because we use it so often. Even if uh,
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: there were higher rates of illiteracy as there were in
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: this time people are still speaking, right, so we're consistently
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: using the rules of language, even if we're not using
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: the the written aspects of it. And that's why this
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: becomes important. Um for Azerbai shot just to like walk
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: through real quick what had happened was it went from
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: Arabic to Latin, then from Latin to Cyrillic. Uh. This
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: was Arabic to Latin nineteen twenties, Latin just really in
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: the nineteen thirties, and then from Cyrillic to Latin again
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: most recently. And they're not alone. Uh. Former North Korean
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: leader or DPRK leader Kim Jong Il was lauded for
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: his quote immortal feats for unified development of national language
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: fearless leader. Yeah. He also rewrote the alphabet. They say
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: it sounds about right. What are you gonna do? What
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: else are you gonna do when you're at the top.
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: Are you trying to get a gift for that dictator
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: in your life who already has everything, get him an alphabet? Yeah? Well,
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: you know he's just trying out different haircuts and inventing
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: new alphabets. That's what you do. And people have tried
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: phonetic language is before in the past. There was a
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: guy we found named William Bullocar, a sixteenth century printer,
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: who created get this, a forty letter phonetic alphabet that
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: seems like too many letters, seems like what the what
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: was the function? The function was you know how Franklin
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: added those six new characters to indicate some groups of sounds.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: This guy was doing some of the same stuff. There's
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: been a spade of this over time. People are constantly
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: trying to come up with their own version of the alphabet,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: it seems, and it's kind of treated like cryptocurrency might
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: be a fad here today, gone tomorrow. But typically what
• 20:21
  Speaker 1: we see in the past is that when people try
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: to construct these phonetic languages, they do the same thing
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: Ben Franklin was doing. There. You know, they'll have one
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: letter that means I N G. At least Ben Franklin
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: was trying to simplify, and it's subtracting rather than adding knowe.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: You know though, Ben uh, this still happening today, albeit
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: in in something of a fictional realm. Have you heard
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: of arabsh Is it a language from space? Ohh yes, Ben,
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, it is from a galaxy
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: far far away. In fact um. It first appeared on
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: like uh computer readouts or spaceship readouts in Return of
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: the Jedi UM, which is part of the original Star
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: Wars trilogy. And it was in the Death Star actually
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: um and one of Darth Vader's shuttles. This is all
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: according to wookie Pedia, which is a thing that I love. UM.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: And then in the nineties a guy named Stephen Crane
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: kind of transcribed this alphabet for use in a Star
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: Wars miniature role playing game called Star Wars Miniature's Battle Companion,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: and it was given the blessing of Lucasfilm and now
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: you can get it in font sets. It's a thirty
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: four letter alphabet UM. And it actually was expanded to
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: have punctuation marks in an update to the role playing
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: game that like a supplement that came out a few
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: years later. So you know, even Ben Franklin's the thing
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: didn't stick around. At least it perseveres in nerd culture absolutely.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: And before you send the email, yes, we are very
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: aware that Tolkien himself was created languages. A lot of
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: times you will hear uh certain members of our cohort
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: here House of Works referred to Tolkien as a linguist
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: who made up a story to rationalize the languages he
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: was inventing. Is that what was used in the Peter
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: Jackson film when you see the etchings on the one
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: ring or whatever? Is that? Yeah? I think that's the
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: language of Mordor. That's right, that's right, that's right, that's
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: right exactly. And uh and yeah, the Elvish that they
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: speak was developed as an actual language. Look at and
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: and people are speaking cling on, people are doing marriage
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: officiations and cling on. Man, it's a brave new world,
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: my friend. And apparently George Bernard Shaw, famous playwright, had
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: a huge issue with the English language. Uh, so much
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: so that he one time, I don't entirely get this.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: I want to see what you think of this. One
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: time he said that the word fish may as well
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: be written as g H O T I. The g
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: h is from laugh, the O from woman or women,
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: and the t i from nation. So he's saying the
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: way they fit together phonetically doesn't make sense. Yeah, And
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: he said the alphabet was hopelessly inadequate. And when he died,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: he left money in his will to develop a new one,
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: one last like Shot from the Dark. I bet he
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: and Franklin and Webster would have would have been buddies.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: I bet they would have been principle, but then they
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: probably would have started arguing. Yeah exactly. Uh. The George
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: Bernard Shaw competition attracted four hundred and sixty seven entries
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: and the winner was a guy named Kingsley Reed, who
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: had a phonetically accurate alphabet of forty eight letters, twenty
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: four vowels, and twenty four consonant. According to the clause
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: and Shaw's will, this alphabet had to be used alongside
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: the traditional alphabet in the new posthumous publications Play and
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: fifty three thousand copies of Andrew Cles and the Lion
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: were printed, and one copy was given to each public
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: library in Britain, the Commonwealth, and North and South America,
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: and to all the national libraries of the world. So
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: this book is out there and you can find that
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: award winning alphabet phonetic alphabet. It's called, of course, goatie fingers.
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: Goat fingers. Yeah, I know it sounds like something delicious
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: from a takeout menu. But goats had hooves, yes, but
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: these are not goat exactly, These are gotee. So what
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: are some other invented languages. I know that it seems
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: like so much that we I feel like we're cutting
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: it short, but I want to let you fly, Ben
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: oh Man, Okay, yes, thank you for setting me up. There. No,
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: just briefly we have to mention Esperanto, which is one
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: of the world's most popular constructed auxiliary languages. It was
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: designed not to be necessarily a first language, but a
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: common tongue that anybody could speak, and it has like
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: two million speakers worldwide and a William Shatner starring movie,
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: if I'm not mistaken, right, Yes, his shining moment in
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty six film Incubus, which my friends who
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: speak Esperanto tell me is hilarious due to pronunciation. Sorry,
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: Mr sh they made us just event have us quote
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: yet the last time? Three time? Yes sounds aloud. It
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: sounds beautiful, right speaking of Renaissance men, Yes, exactly there.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: And of course Ben Franklin is probably going to be
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: a recurring character in the story of Ridiculous History because
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: he got up to some really weird stuff. He was
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: a kinkster. Yes, yes, he was kickster. Uh. He was
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: a fan of air baths. People found skeletons, baths yeah,
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: is that like Airbnb? It could be in an Airbnb.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: It's uh, it's you know, it's reclining in the buff,
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: bathing in the air. He's hanging out naked. Oh okay,
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: why not just call it streaking. It was a different time.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: He also made improvements to something called the glass harmonica,
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: which sounds super spooky. Uh and uh. Skeletons were found
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: under one of his old abodes. Not in his close
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: it though, No, no, no, not in this closet. He
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: was legit. He was legit. If anything, they were probably
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: medical experiments. But that's a story you and I will
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: have to research for another day. In the meantime, we'd
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: like to hear from you. If you are listening to this,
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: you probably write stuff in English. What improvements would you
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: make to the English language? And hey, if you happen
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: to have invented your own improved English alphabet, write us
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: something in that. Send us your phonetic musings too ridiculous
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: at how stuff works dot com, or drop us a
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: note on Facebook, where we're also Ridiculous History, and we're
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: also on Instagram as Ridiculous History. Um. I've driven this
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: pinterest joke into the ground, so I'm not even gonna
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: say it. All I'm gonna say is where we will
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: never have a Pinterest. We will never have a Pinterest. Well,
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: let's put a pin in it. That's not a hard
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: no yet I don't pin well as as Nolan. I
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: resolve this. Uh we bid you Ado and hope you
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: will tune in again very soon for more ridiculous history.