Why does the English alphabet have 26 letters?
To get a full appreciation of why the English alphabet has 26 letters, we first need to detour along the historical byways that trace the relationships between societies, cultures and languages that fashioned all writing systems. In the mid 20th century, Ignace Gelb introduced an evolutionary principle, which presented the earliest writing systems as primitive and pictographic, and syllabic versions (such as the alphabet) as the pinnacle of cultural achievement. “This approach reflects a lot of cultural baggage and is not very accurate,” remarks Steele, a senior research associate in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. “We actually see different types of writing systems coexisting in different historical periods.” Steele cites Egyptian hieroglyphs as a good example of a writing system that developed along a fairly linear path from a picture representing a thing, to a picture representing the word for a thing, then the sounds of the word for a thing. Those sounds can then be applied to other words with different meanings to express abstract concepts.
The full English
In Egypt, around the first half of the second millennium BCE, mine workers who spoke a North-West Semitic language were inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs to create their own alphabetic system. “They created signs based on their own language. So ‘aleph’, derived from the North-West Semitic word for ‘ox’, looks like an ox’s head,” explains Steele. “They also borrowed from hieroglyphs the idea of signs only representing one consonant and applied them to the sounds of their language.” The resultant alphabet probably had around 22 letters, with roughly one-to-one correspondence of consonantal phoneme to letter. However, Indo-European languages such as Greek had many words whose sounds could not be met by consonant signs alone. “So these early alphabet developers redeployed signs already in this initial set to represent vowels and this formed the Greek and later the Latin alphabet with 25 to 26 letters,” adds Steele. Going into the medieval period, with the spread of Catholicism, the Latin alphabet and language became prominent within European Churches. “The earliest recorded Old English is written in Germanic runes, but around the 6th century we start to see the Latin alphabet used for English. Actually, the first versions of English in the Latin alphabet, still threw in a few runic letters!” notes Steele. So, in essence, the English alphabet ended up with 26 letters because that reflected the number of phonemes in the Latin alphabet.
Stirring up alphabet soup
History records many instances of interference in alphabetic development. For example, the early Latin alphabet didn’t have a sign for ‘G’. But as the sound that became associated with it was required, the letter was created by adding a stroke to ‘C’, inserted as the seventh symbol in the alphabet. This location had previously hosted ‘Z’ until it was removed around 300 BC by the Roman censor, Appius Claudius Caecus. “While it was claimed that he simply didn’t like the letter, it was more likely that as ‘Z’ had never been a separate phoneme in Latin, it seemed redundant. It was reinstated as the Romans realised they needed it to transcribe Greek accurately,” says Steele. So, as a language expert, are there any letters that Steele would add to – or cut – from the alphabet? “While it would be useful to have a single letter for certain sounds rather than a digraph like ‘Sh’, I’d overhaul spelling, making it more consistent and easier to learn,” she says. “But then, we’d lose the unique story inscribed in the alphabet, and history isn’t always kind to linguistic reboots.” Click here to find out more about Steele’s research: Unravelling the relationships between early writing systems
Keywords
CREWS, alphabet, writing, phoneme, letter, English, language, hieroglyph, Latin