Posts Tagged ‘alphabet’
“Human society, the world, and the whole of mankind is to be found in the alphabet”*…
… and so we endeavor to teach the alphabet to young children. Hunter Dukes on an amusing– and revealing– example from the 18th century…
It’s as easy as ABC! It’s as easy as pie! In an abecedarium titled The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye, both idioms come true, as children learn an alphabet whose letters greedily gorge on pastry.
The edition featured here was published by John Evans, a major contender in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children’s literature. His formula was simple: undercut the competition, including John Newbery’s firm, by selling unprecedentedly affordable books. He captured an emerging market: children’s books for hard up families who had managed, against the odds, to acquire literacy. And while his competitors targeted a middle-class audience, Evans “stayed true to the street literature tradition in which he had been brought up”, writes literary historian Jonathan Cooper, who gives 1793–1796 as the likely date for Apple-Pye. It was printed on a press at No. 41 Long Lane, West Smithfield, and sold for a halfpenny, like Evans’ other sixteen-page chapbooks — a tiny format, roughly measuring 3.5 inches tall by 2.25 inches wide.
The book is really three texts in one. First comes an ABC list in which the “life and death” of an apple pie plays out across the alphabet. “Apple Pye, Bit it, Cut it, Dealt it, Eat it . . . Took it, View’d it, Wanted it, X, Y, Z, and &, they all wish’d for a piece in hand.” With so many letters vying for a slice, they decide together on an equitable solution: “They all agreed to stand in order / Round the Apple Pye’s fine border / Take turn as they in hornbook stand, / From great A, down to &”.
Next we encounter “A Curious Discourse That Passed Between the Twenty Five Letters at Dinner-Time”. The abecedarian order repeats, but now the letters speak. “Says A, give me a good large slice. . . . Says I, I love the juice the best.” Finally, Evans includes some self-promotion — “if my little readers are pleased with what they have found in this book, they have nothing to do but to run to Mr. Evans’s” — and a woodcut picture of “the old woman who made the Apple Pye”, which transitions abruptly into Christian pedagogy: “Grace before meat”, “Grace after meat”, “The Lord’s Prayer”. Like in other eighteenth-century children’s books, such as The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread, learning here is figured as a kind of gustatory consumption: children eat up the alphabet lesson, while its glyphic personifications wolf down their slices. (The link between sweets and syllabaries is more ancient still: Horace recorded teachers bribing pupils with letter-shaped biscuits to encourage their alphabetical uptake.)
Evans’ edition was published in the late eighteenth century — reworking a primer by Richard Marshall from the 1760s — but The Tragical Death of a Apple Pye is perhaps an even older story, first published, according to some scholars, in 1671. For a modern reader, it preserves English paleography as it existed in an earlier state: across the sections, U and V are used interchangeably, like I and J, and “&” is the ultimate letter, after Z. In an attempt to offset the ampersand’s semiotic difference, teachers well into the nineteenth century instructed students to pronounce the final letters of the alphabet as “x, y, z, and per se &”, hiving off the ampersand with the Latin by itself…
“Peckish Alphabetics: The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye,” from @hunterdukes.bsky.social in @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
More on (and many more illustrations, including the image at the top, from) TTDoaAP here, via “The Gentle Author.”
* Victor Hugo
###
As we learn our letters, we might send instuctive birthday greetings to a woman still hoeing this row: Denise Fleming; she was born on this date in 1950. An award-winning illustrator and creator of children’s books, she has written dozens of volumes for the very young, among which was her contribution to the tradition of which Evans was a part…
“X marks the spot”*…
A reprise (because it’s just so much fun): the challenge facing pre-20th century alphabet book authors…
In 1895, the physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays, a groundbreaking moment in medical history which would lead to myriad improvements to people’s health. Perhaps one overlooked benefit though was in relation to mental health, specifically of those tasked with making alphabet books. How did they represent the letter X before X-rays? Xylophones, which have also been a popular choice through the twentieth century to today, are mysteriously absent in older works. Perhaps explained by the fact that, although around for millennia, the instrument didn’t gain popularity in the West (with the name of “xylophone”) until the early twentieth century. So to what solutions did our industrious publishers turn?
As we see… in addition to drawing on names — be it historical figures, plants, or animals, all mostly of a Greek bent (X being there much more common) — there’s also some more inventive approaches. And some wonderfully lazy ones too…
Many more amusing examples: “X is for...” from @PublicDomainRev.
###
As we wrestle with representation, we might spare a thought for Thomas Young; he died on this date 1829. A polmath described as “the last man who knew everything,” he made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, musical harmony, and Egyptology. His work influenced that of William Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein. Young is credited with establishing Christiaan Huygens’ wave theory of light (in contrast to the corpuscular theory of Isaac Newton).
Further, Young was an astute student of languages. He noticed eerie similarities between Indic and European languages. He went further, analyzing 400 languages spread across continents and millennia and proved that the overlap between some of them was too extensive to be an accident. A single coincidence meant nothing, but each additional one increased the chance of an underlying connection. In 1813, Young declared that all those languages belong to one family. He named it “Indo-European.”
And Young was instrumental in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone.
“H as in How in the World Are We Going to Escape?”*…
A treatise on the the letter “H,” on the occasion of its becoming an arbiter of class in the later 19th century…
In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913), which inspired the musical My Fair Lady, a fictional linguist describes a phonetic endemic: missed employment opportunities due to the connotations of a person’s accent. Addressing the “many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue”, the professor insists that “the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first”. Shaw’s wit shows through in the near homonym: aspirations of social mobility, in this period, often included pronunciationary emulation — the breathy aitch sounds of aspirated consonants.
Alfred Leach, who Steven Connor, in Beyond Words, calls one of the “doughiest defenders of the h”, believed that English’s aspirated aitch (or rather, haitch) signaled a direct inheritance from Classical antiquity. In the pronounced h of words like “herb” — notably lacking from American English — he heard the “spiritus asper” of Hellenism. Leach was writing in a period when linguists began reflecting on the shifting history of aspirates and the role they played in indicating status, class, and education. These traits continue into our present day. The historian of language Henry Hitchings, whose own name is uncannily reminiscent of Shaw’s Henry Higgins, argues that the pronunciation of this letter is “still a significant shibboleth”, and quotes Leach’s contemporary, Oxford scholar Henry Sweet, who called it “an almost infallible test of education and refinement”.
Why so much huffing about the letter H? Throughout the nineteenth century, this aspirated sound was on the rise. At the end of the previous century, Received Pronunciation (RP) became known as the accent of aristocracy, leading to aspirational elocution guides like Poor Letter H (1854). While words like “hotel” had once been pronounced in the French style (oh-tell), English speakers had begun to exhale audibly, as if yawning at the continued Norman influence on British tongues. Leach led the charge against “English Grammarians” who “conspired to withhold from us the means of propitiating this demon Aspirate”. In The Letter H, he ridicules those he calls “H-droppers”, speakers whose phonetic errors seem to snowball: “lost H’s have a knack of turning up in wrong places, when they return at all”. Leach is prone to hyperbole — “the early aspirative labours of a converted H-dropper give birth to monstrosities” — and sneers at Cockney speech: “Horkney hoysters, ‘amshire ‘am, and ‘am and heggs”…
More, from Hunter Dukes (@hunterdukes) in @PublicDomainRev: “Aspirated Aspirations: Alfred Leach’s The Letter H (1880)“
(image above: source)
* Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler), The Hostile Hospital
###
As we ponder pronunciation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1961 that Coronation Street premiered in ITV in the UK. It holds the Guinness World Record for longest running soap opera.
“I got stood up by the letter Y, he was hanging around with his X”*…
It’s perhaps not pornography’s fault that it’s cashing in on a global crisis. As, around the world, whole societies confine themselves to their quarters, traffic to major porn sites has been spiking everywhere, telling us all we need to know about how humans with a broadband connection tend to deal with exceptional levels of boredom and anxiety. From the point-of-view of page views, the season of self-isolation might well be the porn industry’s historical high point — but in terms of reputational damage, it also marks a new low for one of Western culture’s most enigmatic figures.
Once, the letter X was the holiest of all alphabetic symbols, standing for nothing less than the triumph of Christendom itself. The Roman emperor Constantine I imposed his adopted religion on Europe and the Middle East, with armies marching under the banner of an “X,” and for centuries, Latin scribes used it as shorthand for “Christ.”
But at the present moment… the 24th letter of the English alphabet is synonymous not even with professionally lit kissy porn, but rather the explicitier, extremier world of hardcore sharing platforms.
It’s a remarkably stratospheric fall from grace, especially for such a shy and retiring character — X is the second-least-common letter in written English (after Z), and the one that begins by far the fewest number of words. Oh X, what happened to you? Where did it all go so badly wrong that you’re hanging out in NSFW corners of the internet…?
From holiest hallmark to horniest sex symbol — the X-treme, X-haustive story of how the wild child of the alphabet lost its way: “How Did X Become the Edgiest Letter?”
See also: “What’s So Fascinating About the Letter X?” and “Before X Was X: The Dark Horse Story Of The 24th Letter.”
* Norah Jones
###
As we mark the spot, we might recall that it was on this date 1397 that Geoffrey Chaucer “told” (read aloud his ribald, if not X-rated) The Canterbury Tales for the first time at the court of Richard II.
A woodcut from William Caxton‘s second edition of The Canterbury Tales, printed in 1483
“I don’t like the ALPHAbet. I’m going to wait for the BETA version.”*…
The chart shows how the letters used to write English (and many other languages) evolved from Proto-Sinaitic, through Phoenician, early Greek and early Latin, to their present forms. You can see how some letters were dropped and others ended up evolving into more than one letter…
From Matt Baker of UsefulCharts, this chart traces the evolution of our familiar alphabet from its Proto-Sinaitic roots circa 1850-1550 BC. As Kottke observes, it’s tough to see how the pictographic forms of the original script evolved into our letters; aside from the T and maybe M & O, there’s little resemblance. Helpfully, Baker also produced a video:
* Anthony T. Hincks
###
As we follow the thread, we might spare a thought for John Butler Yeats; he died on this date in 1922. An artist many of whose works are displayed in the National Gallery of Ireland, he was the father of poet William Butler Yeats (and his accomplished siblings Lily Yeats, Elizabeth Corbett “Lolly” Yeats and Jack B. Yeats).
W. B. Yeats, by his father J. B. Yeats [source]
Self-portrait, J. B. Yeats [source]
You must be logged in to post a comment.