Why Q Needs U
Why Q Needs U: A history of our letters and how we use them
by Danny Bate
An illuminating, enjoyable and superbly-written journey through the history of the alphabet
As a literacy interventionist, I have to deal with students who are pretty fed up with English spelling. And the situation isn’t helped when they’re told at every turn that English spelling is ‘crazy’, ‘completely irregular’ and ‘impossible to learn’.
To ease their frustration, I’ve found it incredibly helpful to get to grips with etymology and how it explains so many of the complexities of English. I highly recommend Why Q Needs U for any spelling teachers starting their etymological self-education!
What it’s about
Why Q Needs U takes the reader through the history of the alphabet by telling the story of each letter. Danny Bate uses the stories of the first five letters to provide an overview of the history of the alphabet on its long journey to England, and to introduce the main events that affected spelling within Old and Middle English.
The author describes how, in a break from the more pictorial hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, the Phoenicians developed a system based on the acrophonic principle – the idea that a simple picture can be used to represent the first sound of the pictured word. (For example, a picture of a dog would symbolise the sound /d/.) These symbols, which initially just represented consonant sounds, gradually evolved, and were joined by others as they passed through the Greek, Etruscan and Roman civilisations, and the aftermath of the Roman Empire.
When Germanic tribes such as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded England bringing their language with them, the ‘Roman’ alphabet had to adapt to accommodate new sounds and words. Why Q Needs U describes how the invasions of the Vikings and the Normans, the classical influence of the Renaissance, and the disruption of the Great Vowel Shift all played a role in shaping how the 26 letters of the alphabet do their jobs in modern-day English.
Insights from phonetics and phonology
As the journey of each letter is described, Danny Bate often invokes the articulation of sounds to explain why languages evolve over time, and hence why the relationship between letters and sounds is constantly changing.
For example, the odd effect of <w> on the pronunciation of following vowels in words such as swan, wash, war can be explained by articulation. Over time, the rounded lips of /w/ have encroached on the following vowel, meaning that a word such as was, which could rhyme with glass in Shakespeare’s English, is pronounced more like “woz” today.
Syllable structure also affects how we use certain letters. For instance, <x> usually makes the /ks/ sound in English (e.g. fox). However, if <x> occurs at the beginning of a syllable, it is pronounced as /z/ (e.g. xylophone) because English doesn’t allow /ks/ at the start of syllables.
So, as well as learning about etymology, we also dip our toes into phonetics and phonology.
The best bits
I liked the author’s positive approach to English spelling, seeking to understand it rather than despair of it!
“This book aims to push back, very gently, against modern tendencies to mock English spelling and dismiss it as mere graphic anarchy. There are inventive and ingenious rules behind its orthography, even when it departs from the phonemic principle of one sound for one letter. A better perspective on English spelling is that it doesn’t suffer from having too few rules or principles, but rather too many rules and principles in competition. A surplus of regularities can look like irregularity.” (p. 5)
Danny Bate is also very philosophical about whether spelling can – or indeed should – try to attain that elusive goal of matching one letter to one sound:
“Speech keeps changing, while writing lags behind. When we set sounds as the basis of our writing system, we are destined to spend the following centuries trying to keep pace with them.” (p. 350)
He points out that any attempt at spelling reform would face the impossible question, in the world of global English, of ‘whose English’ would form the basis of the spelling system.
Furthermore, if we go beyond the assumption that letters should represent sounds, there are other functions that letters can perform: <wh> can signal an interrogative (who, where, when), <tw> can signal a connection to the number two (two, twelve, twice), and homophones (son, sun; there, their), while confusing to the speller, are actually disambiguating for the reader.
I also enjoyed the small touches of humour and the bonus alliterative phrases (for G: “we can only gawp and gasp at this great graphic gem…”) that helped to lighten what, in other hands, could have been a dense and heavy read.
The takeaway
Why Q Needs U not only provides the basic story of where our letters come from, but also the detail that can explain the peculiarities of English that students find so confusing. After reading this book, you’ll be far less likely to respond to students’ spelling queries with an extremely unhelpful “You’ll just have to remember it!”.
I’m not suggesting that we teach students every detail in this book, but it can be useful even just to have the confidence to say “that letter is there because the alphabet wasn’t originally designed for English”.
For anyone new to teaching spelling, Why Q Needs U would be a fantastic companion to a systematic description of the rules and patterns of present-day English, such as Uncovering the Logic of English (reviewed here) or Spelling for Life (reviewed here).