Alphabet to Email

How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading

Naomi S. Baron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134663071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In Alphabet to Email Naomi Baron takes us on a fascinating and often entertaining journey through the history of the English language, showing how technology - especially email - is gradually stripping language of its formality.
Drawing together strands of thinking about writing, speech, pedagogy, technology, and globalization, Naomi Baron explores the ever-changing relationship between speech and writing and considers the implications of current language trends on the future of written English.
Alphabet to Email will appeal to anyone who is curious about how the English language has changed over the centuries and where it might be going.

1: Robin Hood’s Retort

The year is around 1150, and Robin (of Sherwood Forest fame) has returned to England after years in the Crusades. Much has changed in his absence— Maid Marian has even become a nun. Middle-aged, confused, and stung by his woman’s seeming abandonment, Robin asks how she could have taken vows. Marian patiently explains she had no way of knowing Robin was even still alive:

“You didn’t write,” she chides.

Robin’s innocent retort:

“I never learned how.”

In this imagined sequel to the familiar saga, the film “Robin and Marian” starkly captures the great linguistic divide between medieval and modern times in European-based cultures. Marian presupposes a twentieth-century view of the written word (“Drop a line to let me know how you’re getting on”). Robin, a product of his times, makes no apology for being unable to write. And apologize he shouldn’t, for literacy in the Middle Ages was hardly widespread. Your average warrior or nobleman had no more use for reading or writing than for eating with silverware or regular bathing.

The written word is an integral part of contemporary communication. People who can’t read and write are called illiterate, which presupposes literacy as the norm. Yet the relationship between writing and speaking isn’t straightforward, even in societies that take literacy for granted. Asymmetry sets in from the start. With rare exception, we start to speak before learning to read and write. When literacy instruction begins, we teach children to “write what you say,” but later insist that our charges learn to distinguish between spoken and written styles. We usually encourage children to speak freely (without correcting them), saving normative critiques for the moment they commit words to paper.

Among adults, there are more asymmetries. Most of us have been taught to maintain distinct styles for speaking and for writing. However, increasingly, people are blurring these distinctions in the direction of the informal patterns of spoken language.

Is there a reason to maintain two separate systems of language?

WHY WRITE?

Human memory can perform astounding feats. People have memorized works of Shakespeare or all of the Ramayana. In our dotage we still recall scenes from childhood, and as children we recount every one of our parents’ promises.

Yet memory only carries us so far. We forget to purchase items at the supermarket, have “false memories” about episodes we think we experienced, and squabble over ownership of belongings that don’t bear our names. What’s more, without some durable means of recording our thoughts and words, we have no sure-fire way of accurately transporting ideas through time or space.

Scripting Language

Over the past five millennia, human communities have devised ingenious schemes for making linguistic communication durable. Three basic types of scripts have appeared around the world, sometimes arising independently, sometimes borrowed or adapted from earlier scripts.

Writing can represent meaning directly (logographic scripts), with symbols standing for whole concepts or words. Chinese is the example most commonly cited of a logographic script. Logographic symbols generally derive from pictorial (iconic) representations of the objects or ideas they refer to. However, in many cases the iconic origins of symbols are lost in prehistory.

The other two types of writing systems represent sounds. Syllabic scripts such as Japanese hiragana and katakana pair a syllable (generally a consonant plus a vowel) with a single symbol. Spoken and written words are composed of one or more syllables (and symbols), where the relationship between meaning and symbols is viewed as arbitrary. Alphabetic scripts (such as Attic Greek, Arabic, and English) pair individual sounds with individual symbols. Words are composed of one or more letters (written) corresponding to sounds (spoken), where again the relationship between word-meaning and visual symbols is essentially arbitrary.

Most of the world’s developed writing systems aren’t pure types. For example, Akkadian (which borrowed its script from the Sumerians in the middle of the third millennium BC) became primarily a syllabic system by converting earlier Sumerian logograms to new syllable signs.¹ Middle Egyptian relied on many signs to do double duty, sometimes representing the meaning of a word, and other times standing for one or more sounds.² Use of a single symbol to represent both sound and meaning is found in a number of writing systems of the world, from Mayan in Central America to Chinese and Japanese.

Japanese writing illustrates the contortions that a society can go through in representing the written word. Japanese has not one writing system but three: a logographically-based script, kanji, borrowed from the Chinese, and two related but distinct syllabaries, katakana and hiragana. Normal writing combines all three. Kanji are typically used for core meanings, hiragana to represent grammatical markers, and katakana to show emphasis or represent words borrowed from languages other than Chinese.

The script you’re reading in this book has its roots in a North Semitic alphabetic system that developed in the second millennium BC. North Semitic split into three branches, the most important of which were Aramaic (the source of the Hebrew and Arabic scripts) and Phoenician (from which the Greek, Russian, and Roman alphabets derive). As best we can figure out, the Phoenician script was carried by traders to the Archaic Greek world in the tenth century BC.

It was through the Etruscans that the Greek alphabet reached the West in the eighth century BC. (The Greeks had colonies in Sicily.) By the seventh century BC, the Latin alphabet emerged from the Old Italic and Etruscan scripts, eventually spreading over the known world. Today, the Latin (or Roman) alphabet is used, with minor adaptations, to represent languages as diverse as Norwegian, Turkish, and Vietnamese.

The script in which a language is written often bears political baggage. For example, when Ataturk assumed power over what became modern Turkey, he replaced the use of Arabic script for writing Turkish with the Roman script. The history of scripts in Azerbaijan is even more involuted. Originally, the Arabic script was used for writing Azerbaijani. In the 1920s, a shift was made to Roman script. By the 1930s, Roman was rejected in favor of Cyrillic. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, it was again back to Roman.³

The English language has essentially been written using the Roman alphabet, but with a few additions (and subsequent subtractions) along the way. The first phase of adaptation came on the Continent, north of the Alps, when sometime between the first centuries BC and AD, the Etruscan script became the basis for a runic alphabet.⁴ Several runes emerged to represent Germanic sounds not found in Italic languages (and therefore, not surprisingly, absent from the Latin alphabet). For example, the thorn (<þ>) was used to represent the initial <th> in think (Note: < > indicates alphabetic letters.)

Archaeological evidence suggests that when the invading West-Germanic tribes came to England in the mid-fifth century, they wrote in runes— to the extent they wrote at all. In all probability, when Augustine arrived in 597 as Pope Gregory the Great’s emissary to christianize the heathen, the writing he found was runic. Under the influence of Christianity, the Latin alphabet fairly quickly became the script in which English was written.

Yet the emerging Old English language contained a number of sounds not encoded in the Latin alphabet. Among the non-Latin symbols added to the Old English alphabet (besides the runic thorn) were the ash (<æ>) as in vat (created by juxtaposing the Latin graphemes <a> and <e>) and the eth (<ð>) as in than. The eth was derived from the Irish script, itself an adaptation of Latin.

In the ensuing centuries, the character-set for writing English continued to evolve. Letters such as <v> and <q> (which were part of the Latin alphabet but used only infrequently in Old English) began to get a better workout, thanks to both borrowings from Norman French and internal language change within Middle English. The runic characters were gradually phased out, along with other peculiar Old English symbols such as the ash and the eth. “Re-romanization” of the English script was hastened by the development of printing in the fifteenth century.

When William Caxton began using type in England, his set of type punches didn’t include the letters peculiar to the English alphabet of the time. How was he to handle the thorn (<þ>) and eth (<ð>)? One obvious solution was to substitute the grapheme combination <t> plus <h>, following the occasional practice of earlier English scribes. However, sometimes Caxton turned creative, substituting the <y> punch for the original thorn found in the manuscripts he was setting. Why? Because by the fifteenth century, the top hook on the thorn had been so shortened in height that the letter now looked somewhat like a reversed <y>.⁵ In later centuries, this substitution of <y> for the first sound in think was confused with the use of <y> for the sound [j] (as in yes), yielding the quaint but incorrectly spelled first word in “Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe.” (Note: [ ] indicates pronunciation of sounds.)

Writing is made possible by the existence of a script. But what do societies do with scripts once they have them?

What Bloomfield Knew

“Put writing in your heart,” advised a scribe in fifteenth-century BC Egypt, “that you may protect yourself from hard labour of any kind.”⁶ Given the alternatives (pyramid building, anyone?), we can hardly fault the scribe’s logic. Yet besides sometimes providing a meal ticket, what’s so beneficial about the written word?

Any symbol—a word, a hunk of gold, a piece of the true cross—gains its meaning through social convention. Just so, writing can serve a myriad of functions, but only because a group of people have decided writing is an appropriate medium for doing the job.

The list of possible uses for writing is expansive. We use writing to

make peace treaties

record wills

make laundry lists

break off engagements

send condolences

say hello to Aunt Martha

record the news

present scientific findings

seal death warrants

enable actors to learn their lines

disseminate the word of God

declare independence

render legal judgment

create literature

say goodbye.

In most cases, the same roles can also be filled by speech. In pre-literate and non-literate societies (where speech is the only means of communication), individual and community business proceeds apace, though perhaps not quite the same way and not with quite the same outcomes as when writing is available. There are, of course, functions for which one modality is advantageous or even a necessity. Writing is particularly well suited for very long messages, while speech (or, in some instances, sign language) is vital for communicating with young children. What’s more, as we’ll see later in this chapter, writing not only provides a tool for communication but potentially affects its users as well.

It goes without saying that a particular piece of writing can have more than one function. Sophocles wrote Oedipus Tyrannos as a critique of Athenian democracy, but Freud wholly reinterpreted the play through late Victorian eyes. The early Church Fathers would have been astounded to find modern college curricula offering courses on “The Bible as Literature,” and the diary of Anne Frank was intended as simply that.

Despite the wide-ranging functions of written languages in most literate societies, traditional linguists have long maintained that writing has just one fundamental use: to record speech. The best-known spokesman for this position was Leonard Bloomfield, a pillar of the American linguistic tradition from the 1920s up through the mid-1960s. In the classic 1933 edition of his book Language, Bloomfield wrote that writing isn’t even a form of language. Rather, it’s only a speech surrogate—“merely a way of recording language by means of visible marks.”⁷ As a result of definitive pronouncements such as Bloomfield’s, investigations into the history, functions, and social and cognitive implications of writing were minimal for a good part of the twentieth century.

Of late, interest in the written side of language has mushroomed, especially over the past two decades. Contemporary practitioners—myself included—have generally pooh-poohed Bloomfield’s famous pronouncement, dismissing his views as simply too narrow.⁸ Yet Bloomfield wasn’t naive. If we can get beyond our contemporary (read: multicultural, socially situated) mindset, we find that Bloomfield’s characterization of written language was probably accurate for the disciplinary universe of his time. Field-based linguists of the early twentieth century had a very specific use for written language: to provide a durable record of speech that could later be analyzed. Historical linguists of the time turned to written texts not because they were interested in the written language of previous generations but because these texts were their only clues to earlier forms of spoken language. Linguists (including Bloomfield) who devoted themselves to documenting contemporary languages of rapidly disappearing Native American tribes quite literally saw writing as the only available tool for recording speech. Tape recorders were still many years in the future, and early attempts to cut phonographic records were cumbersome, producing recordings that were low on quality and high on cost. From Bloomfield’s perspective, writing was essentially a transcription of speech.

Contemporary analyses of written language show that writing is both less and more than a mirror of speech. Less, because it leaves out pronunciation, intonation, and facial cues. More, because it often has its own vocabulary, syntax, and usage conventions. Yet at bottom, there’s no denying that writing captures much of what we say—or could say—in face-to-face spoken exchange.

If writing is at least a partial record of speech, what else is it?

One Form, Two Functions

The same written form—the same written record—can serve two very different functions, either successively or simultaneously. Consider the medieval Bible. The faithful generally heard the Bible read...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Alphabet to Email
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface
• 1: Robin Hood’s Retort
• 2: Legitimating Written English
• 3: Who Writes, Who Reads, and Why
• 4: Setting Standards
• 5: The Rise of English Comp
• 6: Commas and Canaries
• 7: What Remington Wrought
• 8: Language at a Distance
• 9: Why the Jury’s Still Out on Email
• 10: Epilogue: Destiny or Choice
• Notes
• Bibliography