November 7, 2023 • 29 mins
"For such a popular, well-known language, English is full of strange, seemingly arbitrary rules. Most people just accept these various idiosyncrasies... but Benjamin Franklin was not most people. In today's classic, listen as Ben and Noel explore Franklin's strange quest to revise the English language by cutting out old letters (and inventing new ones)."
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
No, we got a Ben Franklin episode.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Yeah, we do. Your name's Ben too, that's weird. My
name is Noel, but yeah, Ben Franklin right, former president
Ben Franklin right, not a president, dang it. He's on
the money though, he's on those hondos. He had sure
sure did? He potentially also like to mess around with
(00:23):
uh with dead bodies. That's an episode for another day.
That's not today's episode. Today's is much more the ABC's
of Ben Franklin.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
If you will hashtag no pun left behind, let's ABC
about it. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome
(01:05):
to the show, Friends and Neighbors. My favorite letter of
the English alphabet is Z, and my name is Ben.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
My name is Noel, and my favorite song is the
ABC song. And for the purposes of today's episode, it
goes like this, A B D E F G H I,
K L M N O, P R S t U
V Z app and I don't know how to pronounce
(01:31):
these characters thing of characters.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Right, Ben Franklin, Oh boy? And also, Noel, you laughed
at me. We were hanging out yesterday and I tried
singing that song with this folks. You may notice that
in the rendition of the alphabet song you just heard,
there were some prominent letters missing. And it turns out
that's not an accident. This was on purpose.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
You see.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
There was a fellow, a found father named Benjamin Franklin
who did many, many things right. He was a renaissance man.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
He was a polymath of sorts, a genius. Most people
consider him an elder statesman and as you say, a
founding father, but also an inventor, a scientist, a postmaster,
and a diplomat. And he just kind of did all
the things.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
And today he is sort of an American legend. And
there are a lot of stories about the guy that
turn out later not to be entirely true, you know,
but it is true that he was a prolific renaissance man.
As an inventor, he created things like bifocals, He created
the lightning rod. He created some swimming flipper sets for
(02:47):
hands of flexible catheters, which is weird that there was
a time when there were inflexible catheters ouch, I know,
and the odometer. But one of the things that people
might not know about Benjamin Franklin is that, in addition
to inventing things. He also improved a lot of things,
or attempted to, and one of the things that he
(03:08):
attempted to improve was the English language itself.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, and it's like, you know, we all know that
odominers are around still, swimming flippers are around still, bifocals.
No one's really made them much better than old Ben Franklin.
But you know, we don't really hear much about a
redone English alphabet that sticks around to this day, and
that's because it was a bit of a flop. But
before we get into its ridiculous, abysmal failure, let's talk
(03:34):
a little bit about what this thing was Ben absolutely noel.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Do you recall hooked on Phonics? Were you hooked on phonics?
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Kid? It worked for me, there we go. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Hooked on Phonics was this program in the US, at
least in the US, possibly in other places, that taught
children how to pronounce letters and combinations of letters in
English based on sound them out.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
It worked so well for me, though, that I ended
up in phonics rehab. Oh yeah, you had to. I
had a problem. I had a real phonics problem. Monkey
on my back. But I'm cool now. Yeah, Yeah, I
don't pronounce anything correctly. It's one day at.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
A time, right, So Ben Franklin invented a phonetic alphabet.
He did successfully invent this. He hoped that other people
would be fans of the invention and that this alphabet
would ultimately replace the alphabet we used to date, and
he started by removing letters.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, he did. Franklin's alphabet basically asked six letters, and
those were C, JQ, W, X, and Y. You'll notice
they were missing from My Little Alphabet Diddy at the
beginning of the show, because he thought they were redundant, right.
He argued that, for example, the letter K could handle
(04:53):
the hard C sounds, so no need for C. You
can use a K for that. And then the letter
S could give a soft sea sound, so C was gone.
And then he also added six more characters, which, for
my money, are unpronounceable. When you see them, they look
like something out of an ecronomicon, but they were pretty
(05:14):
functional from Franklin's perspective. There were basically two vowels and
four new consonants, and his idea was to add clarity
in pronunciation, and his characters were specifically based around sounds. So,
for example, he had a new continent that made the
en g sound at the end of like running or
(05:36):
or reaping or seeking.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Right, Yeah, you can see you can see the gist here,
the simplification, or at least the well intentioned steps toward simplification.
Franklin worked on this for a long time. He initially
developed the alphabet in seventeen sixty eight, but he didn't
start publishing it or or floating it around until a
(06:02):
little more than ten years later, in seventeen seventy nine.
He also published some letters that he had written in
this language, and in seventeen eighty nine Noah Webster, who
had heard of Franklin's proposal, included a description of it
in his book Dissertations on the English Language. However, there
(06:23):
was a problem. Webster, you see, did not have the
correct type blocks, because at the time they had to
use blocks, handcut blocks for printing presses, and he couldn't
really describe the alphabet. Webster couldn't because he didn't have
those special six characters cut out in a block, so
(06:45):
he couldn't really illustrate Franklin's changes, and the alphabet itself
really didn't you know. People didn't get it or see
it in action until Franklin had new blocks cast to
print the alphabet for his seventeen ten seventy nine collection
called Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
It's interesting too, because Webster was one of the very
very few supporters of this new alphabet, because he was
all about standardizing American spelling, and this was a big
thing for Franklin too. He argued that his alphabet would
help people spell better, whild would reduce spelling errors. And
(07:29):
it's interesting there are a few letters that Franklin exchanged
with his friend and confidante, Polly Stevenson, who was the
daughter of his landlady in London, and he gave her
away at her wedding, and it was a very important
person in his life, and she had some interesting objections
to this new alphabet, and here Franklin responds to a
(07:54):
few of them. I give you a quote from this letter. Here.
The objection you make to rectify our alphabet, that it
will be attended with inconveniences and difficulties is a natural one,
for always occurs when any reformation is proposed, whether in religion,
government laws, and even down as low as roads and
wheel carriages. The true question, then is not whether there
(08:16):
will be no difficulties or inconveniences, but whether the conveniences
will not, on the whole, be greater than the inconveniences.
So you know, the whole make an omelet. You've got
to break a few eggs argument, right, right.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
It's asking people a lot to change the way that
they speak and write. Because if you've ever looked into
an Encyclopedia entry and you've seen the pronunciation guide, you
know where they have the strange characters. They tell you
this is a glottal sound, right, this is the schwa yeah, yeah,
(08:49):
the unstressed central vowel build upside down e in the
International Phonetic Alphabet. When you see that, you can if
you're not familiar with pronunciation guides, then you can kind
of get a sense of how someone would feel reading
a letter in Ben Franklin English versus you know, English
(09:10):
English totally.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
And when you read some of these excerpts that he
wrote in this alphabet, your brain kind of has to
kind of like do some gymnastics to even parse that file,
and once it does, it does kind of click for you.
It's really interesting where you can make that leap. But
another interesting criticism from Franklin's friend Polly Stevenson was the
(09:36):
idea that changing the language would obscure etymology of words
and their meaning, and Franklin could not disagree more. His
response was this, etymologies are at present very uncertain, but
such as they are, the old books would still preserve them.
An etymologist would there find them. Words in the course
(09:59):
of time change their meaning as well as their spelling
and pronunciation, and we do not look to etymology for
their present meanings. So he really had a deep philosophical
belief that this was the right thing to do. And
it's interesting because, you know, we talked about at the
top of the show what a renaissance man Franklin was
and all the things he invented. But one of his
(10:20):
biographers kind of referred to this whole exercise as taking
Franklin's passion for social improvement to radical extremes right.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And one of the reasons that he did find some
prominent supporters is because there was an ideological and political
aspect to the generation of this language, or the revision
of the language from across the Atlantic. In his piece
in seventeen eighty nine, Noah Webster argues the following Chevrel, Shirkumsteince.
(10:55):
Just render a future sheparation of the American talking from
the English necessary and I'm doing a Webster voice. Numerouslbcal
causes such as a new country, new associations of people,
new combinations of ideas and arts and science, and some
intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe will introduce new
words to the American tongue. So he was arguing that
(11:20):
Ben Franklin's concept was timely and prescient, and that American
English would need to have the opportunity to become its
own thing. And we do see, we do see different
versions of the English language dividing, you know, at least
in terms of slang or figures of speech. But this
(11:42):
idea was radical. This this idea was paving the way
for a written version of American English to be unintelligible
to another English speaker.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, one hundred percent. And to Franklin, language was beach
before writing. And then in a lot of ways, writing
was sort of an inconvenient byproduct of language. It was
just like a thing you had to do to preserve
stories and data and such. But it was ultimately a
byproduct and not the first and foremost concern to Franklin
(12:17):
at least right. Another quote from one of these letters
to Polly Stevenson addressed her third objection, which was that
all books already written would become useless. And you know
to that, and I agree with this, Franklin responds, this
inconvenience would only come on gradually. In a course of ages,
you and other now living readers would hardly forget the
(12:41):
use of them. People would long learn to read the
old writings though they practiced the new, and the inconvenience
is not greater than what has actually happened in a
similar case in Italy. And you know this been formerly
Italian spoke and wrote in Latin, doesn't mean that they
burned all the books that were in Latin. They're still
even today around here people that speak Latin and that
(13:01):
do translations. And translations becomes a very important thing, because
you know, you have to know the original language and
the context and be able to translate the nuances of it. So,
you know, I mean to say that to reinvent a
language is inherently bad, I think is false, agreed, especially
(13:21):
if it is a living language. A living language is
defined as a language that has living native speakers. And
you know, we know that there are dead languages in
the world, unfortunately, throughout history. And we can see the
written evidence of these languages, and we can hear them
(13:42):
reference to read them referenced in other works of the
same rough historical era, but we don't know for sure
how these sounded languages change over time. One of my
favorite things about American English is that anything can be
a verb. Anything could be a verb. You just just
(14:03):
name something and then add I in G and now
it's a verb. Balling.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Let's see walling. You know, Ben Bollaning, Noel Brownanan, Yeah, exactly,
Noel Brownanan.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Noel Brown too, the brown ing.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Yeah, I think I added an extra syllable there. But
you know what, we're going to keep it. And as
ambitious as it might sound, you and I were talking
off air about the kind of chutzpus someone would have
to have to see.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
There you go, Yeah, because I would say, living language,
my friend.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
So how irritated does someone have to be by what
is essentially a tomato tomato argument to say I am
going to change the entire language. Everyone who's already speaking
this needs to conform to my expectation of what language
would be There's a really interesting thing that happens. At
(15:03):
some point when most people are learning the basics of
a new language, there will typically be a moment where
they say, well, why do you do it that way?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
That's dumb?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Why does why does every noun have to have a
gender attached to it or something like that? Sure, and
the answer is, because that's the language. That's the way
this language works exactly, and it can feel, it can
feel kind of. I don't know if it's condescending or
if it's self centered for someone learning the language to
(15:34):
tell everybody else already speaking it that they're doing it
wrong and they should change for one person.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Well, I think it's interesting too that one of Franklin's
big concerns in doing this alphabet was to eliminate spelling errors,
which I find utterly pedantic, you know, and absurd, because again,
it's like, you know, if you're a purist, okay, that's fine.
If you're a stickler for the spelling, I get that,
But ultimately, you know, what someone's saying, if the communication
(16:03):
is successful, isn't it successful? Isn't that what matters the most?
And in fact, you know, Webster actually persisted and published books,
as you said, using a sort of adapted orthography that
was a I believe it was not exactly Franklin's, but
he sort of used that as a jumping off point
and developed something of his own. And he was ridiculed
(16:24):
by critics. And this new language was called unsightly and corrupting,
bastardization of the the proper English language. And that's you know,
that's another question, right at what point is it evolution?
And at what point is it devolution? You know, at
what point are they diluting or ruining a language versus
(16:47):
improving Because one alphabet entrepreneur's improvement is another alphabet entrepreneur's
you know, downfall. They see it as the ruination of language.
And Noah Webster did succeed in creating an American spelling
but he did also eventually walk away from alphabet reform,
(17:07):
which he saw is a bit too radical. And it
turns out he was absolutely on the money about the
importance of political identity or exactly you know, and language.
And we see this happening in other countries as well.
There was a cool article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine
(17:30):
in nineteen ninety seven that talked about how alphabet shifts
became common in times of instability. In former Soviet republics,
for instance, alphabet shifts became so common that people started
calling the phenomenon new alphabet disease. So, you know, Azerbaijan
(17:51):
is probably the most famous example. It's changed their alphabet
three times. The whole thing. That's insane in the last
one hundred years. How could you keep up hundred years?
I guess you got time to learn it. But even
still that seems very extreme because, like you said, it's
so tied to national identity, which I think is probably
the main reason that this exercise from mister Franklin just
(18:13):
totally fell flat.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
And he you know, I'm getting this sensinel that he
was very much a spaghetti at the wall kind of guy. Absolutely,
if he had stuff, he came up with, he had idea,
he just went for it.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Did you know that he even suggested that the eagle
was not an appropriate icon for America and that it
should instead be the turkey. Yes, yeah, the turkey, which
I think he said was a proud bird exactly he
said it was that the eagle was a bird of
bad moral character. So you know, Franklin was also a
(18:45):
bit of a troll, which I love, you know, But
it's like this whole alphabet thing. When you look at
it from an academic perspective and from the mind of
a brilliant thinker like Ben Franklin, you could see how
maybe he would think this was a good idea, but
in practice it's just too much of a pain in
the ass, right, right it is.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
The people are very sensitive about language, especially because we
use it so often. Even if there were higher rates
of illiteracy as there were in this time, people are
still speaking, right, so we're consistently using the rules of language,
even if we're not using the written aspects of it.
(19:27):
And that's why this becomes important for Azerbaijan just to
like walk through real quick what had happened was it
went from Arabic to Latin, then from Latin to Cyrillic.
This was Arabic to Latin nineteen twenties, Latin issrelic in
the nineteen thirties, and then from Cyrillic to Latin again
most recently. And they're not alone. Former North Korean leader
(19:53):
or DPRK leader Kim Jong il was lauded for his
quote immortal feats for unif development of national Language Fearless Leader. Yeah,
he also rewrote the alphabet. They say, sounds about right,
what are you going to do? What else are you
going to do when you're at the top. Are you
trying to get a gift for that dictator in your
(20:13):
life who already has everything? Get them in alphabet?
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, well, you know, he's just trying out different haircuts
and inventing new alphabets. That's what you do.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
And people who tried phonetic languages before in the past.
There was a guy we found named William Bullocar, a
sixteenth century printer who created get this a forty letter
phonetic alphabet that seems like too many letters.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Just a lot of letters. It seems like a lot
of lets. What was the function?
Speaker 1 (20:39):
The function was, you know how Franklin added those six
new characters to indicate some groups of sounds. This guy
was doing some of the same stuff. There's been a
spate of this over time. People are constantly trying to
come up with their own version of the alphabet, it seems,
and it's kind of treated like cryptocurrency totally might be
(21:00):
a fad here today, gone tomorrow, but typically what we
see in the past is that when people try to
construct these phonetic languages, they do the same thing. Ben
Franklin was doing that. You know, they'll have one letter
that means I in G.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Right, at least Ben Franklin was trying to simplify subtracting
rather than adding, you knowwy five letters. That's insane. You know, though, Ben,
this is still happening today, albeit in something of a
(21:38):
fictional realm. Have you heard of Arabesh?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Is it a language from space?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Why? Yes, Ben, As a matter of fact, it is
from a galaxy far far away. In fact, it first
appeared on like computer readouts or spaceship readouts in Return
of the Jedi, which is part of the original Star
Wars trilogy, and it was in the Death Star actually
and one of Darth Vader's shuttles. This is all according
to wookie Pedia, which is a thing that I love.
(22:12):
And then in the nineties a guy named Stephen Crane
kind of transcribed this alphabet for use in a Star
Wars miniature role playing game called Star Wars Miniature's Battle Companion,
and it was given the blessing of Lucasfilm and now
you can get it in font sets. It's a thirty
four letter alphabet, and it actually was expanded to have
(22:36):
punctuation marks in an update to the role playing game
that like a supplement that came out a few years
later in nineteen ninety six. So you know, even though
Ben Franklin's the thing didn't stick around, at least it
perseveres in a nerd culture.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Absolutely. And before you send the email, yes, we are
very aware that Tolkien himself was created languages. A lot
of times you'll hear certain members of our cohort here
at House of Works refer to Tolkien as a linguist
who made up a story to rationalize the languages he
(23:12):
was inventing.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Is that what was used in the Peter Jackson film
when you see the etchings on the one ring.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
M Yeah, I think that's the language of Mordor.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, and yeah, the Elvish that they speak was developed
as an actual language. Look at and people are speaking Klingon,
people are doing marriage officiations and clingon.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Man, it's a brave new world, my friend.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
And apparently George Bernard Shaw, famous playwright, had a huge
issue with the English language, so much so that he
one time, I don't entirely get this. I want to
see what you think of this. One time he said
that the word fish may as well be written as
gho ti. The gh is from laugh, the O from
(24:01):
women or women, and the ti from nation. So he's
saying the way they fit together phonetically, yeah, doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Stupid.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Yeah, he said the alphabet was hopelessly inadequate, and when
he died, he left money in his will to develop
a new one, one last, Like Shot from the Dark.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
I bet he and Franklin and Webster would have been buddies.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
I bet they would have been principle, but then they
probably would have started arguing mine's better. Yeah, exactly. The
George Bernard Shaw Competition attracted four hundred and sixty seven entries,
and the winner was a guy named Kingsley Reid, who
had a phonetically accurate alphabet of forty eight letters, twenty
four vowels, and twenty four consonants. According to the clause
(24:47):
in Shaw's will, this alphabet had to be used alongside
the traditional alphabet in the new posthumous publication of his
play and fifty three thousand copies of Androcles and the
Lion were printed and one copy was given to each
public library in Britain, the Commonwealth, and North and South America,
(25:09):
and to all the national libraries of the world.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
So this book is out.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
There and you can find that award winning alphabet phonetic alphabet.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
It's called, of.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Course, goaty fingers.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Goaty fingers.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah, I know it sounds like something delicious from a
takeout menu. But goats had hooves, yes, but these are
not goat exactly. These are goate Oh I see, I see.
So what are some other invented languages? I know it
seems like so much that we I feel like we're
cutting it short, but I want to let you fly,
(25:47):
Ben oh Man, Okay, yes, thank you for setting me
up there, Noel, Just briefly, we have to mention Esperanto,
which is one of the world's most popular constructed auxiliary languages.
It was this mind not to be necessarily a first language,
but a common tongue that anybody could speak, and it
has like two million speakers worldwide and.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
A William Shatner starring movie, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Right, Yes, his shining moment in the nineteen sixty six
film incubus, which my friends who speak Esperanto tell me
is hilarious due to pronunciation.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Sorry, mister, they made.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
A suggested them have us.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yes, tecto.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Cikla from the last time three time.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Sans beautiful right, speaking of Renaissance men, Yes, exactly. Shatner
and of.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Course Ben Franklin is probably going to be a recurring
character in the story of Ridiculous History because he got
up to some really weird stuff.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
He was a kinkster.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yes, yes, he was keekster. He was a fan of
air baths. People found skeletons a baths.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, is that like Airbnb?
Speaker 1 (27:15):
It could be in an Airbnbka, it's it's you know,
it's reclining in the buff, bathing in the air. He's
hanging out naked.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Oh okay, why not just call it streaking.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
It was a different time, okay. He also made improvements
to something called the glass harmonica, which sounds super spooky,
and skeletons were found under one.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Of his old abodes. Not in his closet though, No, no, no,
not in his closet. He was legit. He was legit.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
If anything, there were probably medical experiments, but that's a story.
You and I will have to research for another day.
In the meantime, we'd like to hear from you if
you were listening to this, I'm gonna go out on
a limb and say that you probably write stuff in English.
What improvements would you make to the English language?
Speaker 2 (28:09):
And hey, if you happen to have invented your own
improved English alphabet, write us something in that. Send us
your phonetic musings to Ridiculous at HowStuffWorks dot com, or
drop us a note on Facebook, where we're also Ridiculous History,
and we're also on Instagram as Ridiculous History. I've driven
this Pinterest joke into the ground, so I'm not even
(28:29):
gonna say it. All I'm gonna say is we're we
will never have a Pinterest. We will never have a Pinterest.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Well, let's put a pin in it.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Not a hard no yet, I don't pin.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Well as Nola and I resolve this. We bid you
Ado and hope you will tune in again very soon
for more Ridiculous History.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
No, we got a Ben Franklin episode.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Yeah, we do. Your name's Ben too, that's weird. My
name is Noel, but yeah, Ben Franklin right, former president
Ben Franklin right, not a president, dang it. He's on
the money though, he's on those hondos. He had sure
sure did? He potentially also like to mess around with
(00:23):
uh with dead bodies. That's an episode for another day.
That's not today's episode. Today's is much more the ABC's
of Ben Franklin.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
If you will hashtag no pun left behind, let's ABC
about it. Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome
(01:05):
to the show, Friends and Neighbors. My favorite letter of
the English alphabet is Z, and my name is Ben.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
My name is Noel, and my favorite song is the
ABC song. And for the purposes of today's episode, it
goes like this, A B D E F G H I,
K L M N O, P R S t U
V Z app and I don't know how to pronounce
(01:31):
these characters thing of characters.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Right, Ben Franklin, Oh boy? And also, Noel, you laughed
at me. We were hanging out yesterday and I tried
singing that song with this folks. You may notice that
in the rendition of the alphabet song you just heard,
there were some prominent letters missing. And it turns out
that's not an accident. This was on purpose.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
You see.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
There was a fellow, a found father named Benjamin Franklin
who did many, many things right. He was a renaissance man.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
He was a polymath of sorts, a genius. Most people
consider him an elder statesman and as you say, a
founding father, but also an inventor, a scientist, a postmaster,
and a diplomat. And he just kind of did all
the things.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
And today he is sort of an American legend. And
there are a lot of stories about the guy that
turn out later not to be entirely true, you know,
but it is true that he was a prolific renaissance man.
As an inventor, he created things like bifocals, He created
the lightning rod. He created some swimming flipper sets for
(02:47):
hands of flexible catheters, which is weird that there was
a time when there were inflexible catheters ouch, I know,
and the odometer. But one of the things that people
might not know about Benjamin Franklin is that, in addition
to inventing things. He also improved a lot of things,
or attempted to, and one of the things that he
(03:08):
attempted to improve was the English language itself.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
Yeah, and it's like, you know, we all know that
odominers are around still, swimming flippers are around still, bifocals.
No one's really made them much better than old Ben Franklin.
But you know, we don't really hear much about a
redone English alphabet that sticks around to this day, and
that's because it was a bit of a flop. But
before we get into its ridiculous, abysmal failure, let's talk
(03:34):
a little bit about what this thing was Ben absolutely noel.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Do you recall hooked on Phonics? Were you hooked on phonics?
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Kid? It worked for me, there we go. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Hooked on Phonics was this program in the US, at
least in the US, possibly in other places, that taught
children how to pronounce letters and combinations of letters in
English based on sound them out.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
It worked so well for me, though, that I ended
up in phonics rehab. Oh yeah, you had to. I
had a problem. I had a real phonics problem. Monkey
on my back. But I'm cool now. Yeah, Yeah, I
don't pronounce anything correctly. It's one day at.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
A time, right, So Ben Franklin invented a phonetic alphabet.
He did successfully invent this. He hoped that other people
would be fans of the invention and that this alphabet
would ultimately replace the alphabet we used to date, and
he started by removing letters.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, he did. Franklin's alphabet basically asked six letters, and
those were C, JQ, W, X, and Y. You'll notice
they were missing from My Little Alphabet Diddy at the
beginning of the show, because he thought they were redundant, right.
He argued that, for example, the letter K could handle
(04:53):
the hard C sounds, so no need for C. You
can use a K for that. And then the letter
S could give a soft sea sound, so C was gone.
And then he also added six more characters, which, for
my money, are unpronounceable. When you see them, they look
like something out of an ecronomicon, but they were pretty
(05:14):
functional from Franklin's perspective. There were basically two vowels and
four new consonants, and his idea was to add clarity
in pronunciation, and his characters were specifically based around sounds. So,
for example, he had a new continent that made the
en g sound at the end of like running or
(05:36):
or reaping or seeking.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Right, Yeah, you can see you can see the gist here,
the simplification, or at least the well intentioned steps toward simplification.
Franklin worked on this for a long time. He initially
developed the alphabet in seventeen sixty eight, but he didn't
start publishing it or or floating it around until a
(06:02):
little more than ten years later, in seventeen seventy nine.
He also published some letters that he had written in
this language, and in seventeen eighty nine Noah Webster, who
had heard of Franklin's proposal, included a description of it
in his book Dissertations on the English Language. However, there
(06:23):
was a problem. Webster, you see, did not have the
correct type blocks, because at the time they had to
use blocks, handcut blocks for printing presses, and he couldn't
really describe the alphabet. Webster couldn't because he didn't have
those special six characters cut out in a block, so
(06:45):
he couldn't really illustrate Franklin's changes, and the alphabet itself
really didn't you know. People didn't get it or see
it in action until Franklin had new blocks cast to
print the alphabet for his seventeen ten seventy nine collection
called Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
It's interesting too, because Webster was one of the very
very few supporters of this new alphabet, because he was
all about standardizing American spelling, and this was a big
thing for Franklin too. He argued that his alphabet would
help people spell better, whild would reduce spelling errors. And
(07:29):
it's interesting there are a few letters that Franklin exchanged
with his friend and confidante, Polly Stevenson, who was the
daughter of his landlady in London, and he gave her
away at her wedding, and it was a very important
person in his life, and she had some interesting objections
to this new alphabet, and here Franklin responds to a
(07:54):
few of them. I give you a quote from this letter. Here.
The objection you make to rectify our alphabet, that it
will be attended with inconveniences and difficulties is a natural one,
for always occurs when any reformation is proposed, whether in religion,
government laws, and even down as low as roads and
wheel carriages. The true question, then is not whether there
(08:16):
will be no difficulties or inconveniences, but whether the conveniences
will not, on the whole, be greater than the inconveniences.
So you know, the whole make an omelet. You've got
to break a few eggs argument, right, right.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
It's asking people a lot to change the way that
they speak and write. Because if you've ever looked into
an Encyclopedia entry and you've seen the pronunciation guide, you
know where they have the strange characters. They tell you
this is a glottal sound, right, this is the schwa yeah, yeah,
(08:49):
the unstressed central vowel build upside down e in the
International Phonetic Alphabet. When you see that, you can if
you're not familiar with pronunciation guides, then you can kind
of get a sense of how someone would feel reading
a letter in Ben Franklin English versus you know, English
(09:10):
English totally.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
And when you read some of these excerpts that he
wrote in this alphabet, your brain kind of has to
kind of like do some gymnastics to even parse that file,
and once it does, it does kind of click for you.
It's really interesting where you can make that leap. But
another interesting criticism from Franklin's friend Polly Stevenson was the
(09:36):
idea that changing the language would obscure etymology of words
and their meaning, and Franklin could not disagree more. His
response was this, etymologies are at present very uncertain, but
such as they are, the old books would still preserve them.
An etymologist would there find them. Words in the course
(09:59):
of time change their meaning as well as their spelling
and pronunciation, and we do not look to etymology for
their present meanings. So he really had a deep philosophical
belief that this was the right thing to do. And
it's interesting because, you know, we talked about at the
top of the show what a renaissance man Franklin was
and all the things he invented. But one of his
(10:20):
biographers kind of referred to this whole exercise as taking
Franklin's passion for social improvement to radical extremes right.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And one of the reasons that he did find some
prominent supporters is because there was an ideological and political
aspect to the generation of this language, or the revision
of the language from across the Atlantic. In his piece
in seventeen eighty nine, Noah Webster argues the following Chevrel, Shirkumsteince.
(10:55):
Just render a future sheparation of the American talking from
the English necessary and I'm doing a Webster voice. Numerouslbcal
causes such as a new country, new associations of people,
new combinations of ideas and arts and science, and some
intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe will introduce new
words to the American tongue. So he was arguing that
(11:20):
Ben Franklin's concept was timely and prescient, and that American
English would need to have the opportunity to become its
own thing. And we do see, we do see different
versions of the English language dividing, you know, at least
in terms of slang or figures of speech. But this
(11:42):
idea was radical. This this idea was paving the way
for a written version of American English to be unintelligible
to another English speaker.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Yeah, one hundred percent. And to Franklin, language was beach
before writing. And then in a lot of ways, writing
was sort of an inconvenient byproduct of language. It was
just like a thing you had to do to preserve
stories and data and such. But it was ultimately a
byproduct and not the first and foremost concern to Franklin
(12:17):
at least right. Another quote from one of these letters
to Polly Stevenson addressed her third objection, which was that
all books already written would become useless. And you know
to that, and I agree with this, Franklin responds, this
inconvenience would only come on gradually. In a course of ages,
you and other now living readers would hardly forget the
(12:41):
use of them. People would long learn to read the
old writings though they practiced the new, and the inconvenience
is not greater than what has actually happened in a
similar case in Italy. And you know this been formerly
Italian spoke and wrote in Latin, doesn't mean that they
burned all the books that were in Latin. They're still
even today around here people that speak Latin and that
(13:01):
do translations. And translations becomes a very important thing, because
you know, you have to know the original language and
the context and be able to translate the nuances of it. So,
you know, I mean to say that to reinvent a
language is inherently bad, I think is false, agreed, especially
(13:21):
if it is a living language. A living language is
defined as a language that has living native speakers. And
you know, we know that there are dead languages in
the world, unfortunately, throughout history. And we can see the
written evidence of these languages, and we can hear them
(13:42):
reference to read them referenced in other works of the
same rough historical era, but we don't know for sure
how these sounded languages change over time. One of my
favorite things about American English is that anything can be
a verb. Anything could be a verb. You just just
(14:03):
name something and then add I in G and now
it's a verb. Balling.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Let's see walling. You know, Ben Bollaning, Noel Brownanan, Yeah, exactly,
Noel Brownanan.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
Noel Brown too, the brown ing.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Yeah, I think I added an extra syllable there. But
you know what, we're going to keep it. And as
ambitious as it might sound, you and I were talking
off air about the kind of chutzpus someone would have
to have to see.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
There you go, Yeah, because I would say, living language,
my friend.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
So how irritated does someone have to be by what
is essentially a tomato tomato argument to say I am
going to change the entire language. Everyone who's already speaking
this needs to conform to my expectation of what language
would be There's a really interesting thing that happens. At
(15:03):
some point when most people are learning the basics of
a new language, there will typically be a moment where
they say, well, why do you do it that way?
Speaker 2 (15:13):
That's dumb?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Why does why does every noun have to have a
gender attached to it or something like that? Sure, and
the answer is, because that's the language. That's the way
this language works exactly, and it can feel, it can
feel kind of. I don't know if it's condescending or
if it's self centered for someone learning the language to
(15:34):
tell everybody else already speaking it that they're doing it
wrong and they should change for one person.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Well, I think it's interesting too that one of Franklin's
big concerns in doing this alphabet was to eliminate spelling errors,
which I find utterly pedantic, you know, and absurd, because again,
it's like, you know, if you're a purist, okay, that's fine.
If you're a stickler for the spelling, I get that,
But ultimately, you know, what someone's saying, if the communication
(16:03):
is successful, isn't it successful? Isn't that what matters the most?
And in fact, you know, Webster actually persisted and published books,
as you said, using a sort of adapted orthography that
was a I believe it was not exactly Franklin's, but
he sort of used that as a jumping off point
and developed something of his own. And he was ridiculed
(16:24):
by critics. And this new language was called unsightly and corrupting,
bastardization of the the proper English language. And that's you know,
that's another question, right at what point is it evolution?
And at what point is it devolution? You know, at
what point are they diluting or ruining a language versus
(16:47):
improving Because one alphabet entrepreneur's improvement is another alphabet entrepreneur's
you know, downfall. They see it as the ruination of language.
And Noah Webster did succeed in creating an American spelling
but he did also eventually walk away from alphabet reform,
(17:07):
which he saw is a bit too radical. And it
turns out he was absolutely on the money about the
importance of political identity or exactly you know, and language.
And we see this happening in other countries as well.
There was a cool article in the Atlantic Monthly magazine
(17:30):
in nineteen ninety seven that talked about how alphabet shifts
became common in times of instability. In former Soviet republics,
for instance, alphabet shifts became so common that people started
calling the phenomenon new alphabet disease. So, you know, Azerbaijan
(17:51):
is probably the most famous example. It's changed their alphabet
three times. The whole thing. That's insane in the last
one hundred years. How could you keep up hundred years?
I guess you got time to learn it. But even
still that seems very extreme because, like you said, it's
so tied to national identity, which I think is probably
the main reason that this exercise from mister Franklin just
(18:13):
totally fell flat.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
And he you know, I'm getting this sensinel that he
was very much a spaghetti at the wall kind of guy. Absolutely,
if he had stuff, he came up with, he had idea,
he just went for it.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
Did you know that he even suggested that the eagle
was not an appropriate icon for America and that it
should instead be the turkey. Yes, yeah, the turkey, which
I think he said was a proud bird exactly he
said it was that the eagle was a bird of
bad moral character. So you know, Franklin was also a
(18:45):
bit of a troll, which I love, you know, But
it's like this whole alphabet thing. When you look at
it from an academic perspective and from the mind of
a brilliant thinker like Ben Franklin, you could see how
maybe he would think this was a good idea, but
in practice it's just too much of a pain in
the ass, right, right it is.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
The people are very sensitive about language, especially because we
use it so often. Even if there were higher rates
of illiteracy as there were in this time, people are
still speaking, right, so we're consistently using the rules of language,
even if we're not using the written aspects of it.
(19:27):
And that's why this becomes important for Azerbaijan just to
like walk through real quick what had happened was it
went from Arabic to Latin, then from Latin to Cyrillic.
This was Arabic to Latin nineteen twenties, Latin issrelic in
the nineteen thirties, and then from Cyrillic to Latin again
most recently. And they're not alone. Former North Korean leader
(19:53):
or DPRK leader Kim Jong il was lauded for his
quote immortal feats for unif development of national Language Fearless Leader. Yeah,
he also rewrote the alphabet. They say, sounds about right,
what are you going to do? What else are you
going to do when you're at the top. Are you
trying to get a gift for that dictator in your
(20:13):
life who already has everything? Get them in alphabet?
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Yeah, well, you know, he's just trying out different haircuts
and inventing new alphabets. That's what you do.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
And people who tried phonetic languages before in the past.
There was a guy we found named William Bullocar, a
sixteenth century printer who created get this a forty letter
phonetic alphabet that seems like too many letters.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
Just a lot of letters. It seems like a lot
of lets. What was the function?
Speaker 1 (20:39):
The function was, you know how Franklin added those six
new characters to indicate some groups of sounds. This guy
was doing some of the same stuff. There's been a
spate of this over time. People are constantly trying to
come up with their own version of the alphabet, it seems,
and it's kind of treated like cryptocurrency totally might be
(21:00):
a fad here today, gone tomorrow, but typically what we
see in the past is that when people try to
construct these phonetic languages, they do the same thing. Ben
Franklin was doing that. You know, they'll have one letter
that means I in G.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Right, at least Ben Franklin was trying to simplify subtracting
rather than adding, you knowwy five letters. That's insane. You know, though, Ben,
this is still happening today, albeit in something of a
(21:38):
fictional realm. Have you heard of Arabesh?
Speaker 1 (21:43):
Is it a language from space?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
Why? Yes, Ben, As a matter of fact, it is
from a galaxy far far away. In fact, it first
appeared on like computer readouts or spaceship readouts in Return
of the Jedi, which is part of the original Star
Wars trilogy, and it was in the Death Star actually
and one of Darth Vader's shuttles. This is all according
to wookie Pedia, which is a thing that I love.
(22:12):
And then in the nineties a guy named Stephen Crane
kind of transcribed this alphabet for use in a Star
Wars miniature role playing game called Star Wars Miniature's Battle Companion,
and it was given the blessing of Lucasfilm and now
you can get it in font sets. It's a thirty
four letter alphabet, and it actually was expanded to have
(22:36):
punctuation marks in an update to the role playing game
that like a supplement that came out a few years
later in nineteen ninety six. So you know, even though
Ben Franklin's the thing didn't stick around, at least it
perseveres in a nerd culture.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Absolutely. And before you send the email, yes, we are
very aware that Tolkien himself was created languages. A lot
of times you'll hear certain members of our cohort here
at House of Works refer to Tolkien as a linguist
who made up a story to rationalize the languages he
(23:12):
was inventing.
Speaker 2 (23:13):
Is that what was used in the Peter Jackson film
when you see the etchings on the one ring.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
M Yeah, I think that's the language of Mordor.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
That's right, that's right, that's right, that's right exactly.
Speaker 1 (23:25):
Yeah, and yeah, the Elvish that they speak was developed
as an actual language. Look at and people are speaking Klingon,
people are doing marriage officiations and clingon.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Man, it's a brave new world, my friend.
Speaker 1 (23:38):
And apparently George Bernard Shaw, famous playwright, had a huge
issue with the English language, so much so that he
one time, I don't entirely get this. I want to
see what you think of this. One time he said
that the word fish may as well be written as
gho ti. The gh is from laugh, the O from
(24:01):
women or women, and the ti from nation. So he's
saying the way they fit together phonetically, yeah, doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Stupid.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Yeah, he said the alphabet was hopelessly inadequate, and when
he died, he left money in his will to develop
a new one, one last, Like Shot from the Dark.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
I bet he and Franklin and Webster would have been buddies.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
I bet they would have been principle, but then they
probably would have started arguing mine's better. Yeah, exactly. The
George Bernard Shaw Competition attracted four hundred and sixty seven entries,
and the winner was a guy named Kingsley Reid, who
had a phonetically accurate alphabet of forty eight letters, twenty
four vowels, and twenty four consonants. According to the clause
(24:47):
in Shaw's will, this alphabet had to be used alongside
the traditional alphabet in the new posthumous publication of his
play and fifty three thousand copies of Androcles and the
Lion were printed and one copy was given to each
public library in Britain, the Commonwealth, and North and South America,
(25:09):
and to all the national libraries of the world.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
So this book is out.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
There and you can find that award winning alphabet phonetic alphabet.
Speaker 2 (25:22):
It's called, of.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
Course, goaty fingers.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Goaty fingers.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Yeah, I know it sounds like something delicious from a
takeout menu. But goats had hooves, yes, but these are
not goat exactly. These are goate Oh I see, I see.
So what are some other invented languages? I know it
seems like so much that we I feel like we're
cutting it short, but I want to let you fly,
(25:47):
Ben oh Man, Okay, yes, thank you for setting me
up there, Noel, Just briefly, we have to mention Esperanto,
which is one of the world's most popular constructed auxiliary languages.
It was this mind not to be necessarily a first language,
but a common tongue that anybody could speak, and it
has like two million speakers worldwide and.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
A William Shatner starring movie, if I'm not mistaken.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
Right, Yes, his shining moment in the nineteen sixty six
film incubus, which my friends who speak Esperanto tell me
is hilarious due to pronunciation.
Speaker 2 (26:25):
Sorry, mister, they made.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
A suggested them have us.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yes, tecto.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
Cikla from the last time three time.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
Sans beautiful right, speaking of Renaissance men, Yes, exactly. Shatner
and of.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
Course Ben Franklin is probably going to be a recurring
character in the story of Ridiculous History because he got
up to some really weird stuff.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
He was a kinkster.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Yes, yes, he was keekster. He was a fan of
air baths. People found skeletons a baths.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
Yeah, is that like Airbnb?
Speaker 1 (27:15):
It could be in an Airbnbka, it's it's you know,
it's reclining in the buff, bathing in the air. He's
hanging out naked.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Oh okay, why not just call it streaking.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
It was a different time, okay. He also made improvements
to something called the glass harmonica, which sounds super spooky,
and skeletons were found under one.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
Of his old abodes. Not in his closet though, No, no, no,
not in his closet. He was legit. He was legit.
Speaker 1 (27:50):
If anything, there were probably medical experiments, but that's a story.
You and I will have to research for another day.
In the meantime, we'd like to hear from you if
you were listening to this, I'm gonna go out on
a limb and say that you probably write stuff in English.
What improvements would you make to the English language?
Speaker 2 (28:09):
And hey, if you happen to have invented your own
improved English alphabet, write us something in that. Send us
your phonetic musings to Ridiculous at HowStuffWorks dot com, or
drop us a note on Facebook, where we're also Ridiculous History,
and we're also on Instagram as Ridiculous History. I've driven
this Pinterest joke into the ground, so I'm not even
(28:29):
gonna say it. All I'm gonna say is we're we
will never have a Pinterest. We will never have a Pinterest.
Speaker 1 (28:35):
Well, let's put a pin in it.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Not a hard no yet, I don't pin.
Speaker 1 (28:41):
Well as Nola and I resolve this. We bid you
Ado and hope you will tune in again very soon
for more Ridiculous History.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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