An A-Z history of the English alphabet
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
Which letter in the English alphabet did Benjamin Franklin think we'd be better off without? Why must the letter U almost always follow the letter Q? And what is the point of silent letters? From the first scratches carved into stone to the maddening mysteries of modern English spelling, the alphabet has had a long and extraordinary journey. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Emily Briffitt is joined by linguist, writer and broadcaster Danny Bate to explore the history of the English alphabet and the strange story behind the letters we use every day.
Thank you very much for joining us on the podcast to talk all about your new book, Why Q Needs You. Now, we are going to be talking all about the history of the English alphabet, but I suppose my first question for you would be, if we could travel through time back to the birthplace of the alphabet, where and when would we end up and what would it look like? Would the alphabet be something that we would imagine? Well, I suppose firstly we wouldn't want to because then history podcasters would be out of a job because we could just travel back and wouldn't have any lovely discussion today.
But to answer your question seriously, we would be traveling to ancient Egypt. specifically one of the three eras of Egypt that's known as the Middle Kingdom. And the alphabet, the kind of origination or the moment of creation of the alphabet is within the Middle Kingdom, round about the year, let's say, 1900 to 1800 BC. And I'm happy to talk more details about this, but basically I must preface that by saying everything is dependent on our sources.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (44 minutes, 8,190 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.