December 12, 2024 • 48 mins
How did the English alphabet -- a strange agglomeration of curved and straight-lined symbols -- become a thing? In the second part of this special two-part series, Ben, Noel and Max dive into the messy evolution of modern English, with a special shoutout to each letter of the current alphabet and a more than a little speculation about the future of written communication. ProTip: this is going to be hilarious a century or so from when we record it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(00:28):
fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in. This is the second part of our episode
on the weird weird story of how the modern English
alphabet became a thing. So on a personal message, I
owe you and sometimes why our.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
You owe me? We owe each other the world.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yes, it's true, and that's our super producer, mister Max Williams.
That's the main man, our pal, mister Noel Brown. Helloh,
they called me ben Bollen in many parts of the world.
And no h for anybody who is tuning in. Now,
what did we learn in our previous exploration of the
(01:17):
English alphabet?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Oh? Boy, where to even start? We learned that Chaucer
was a saucy boy. He liked butts and talking funny.
And we learned that Max has a real talent for
voice acting. Those are my two major takeaways.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
M Yeah, and those are great things to take away
from the first episode and to take with us in
the second episode. Fellow Ridiculous Historians, Please, please please, if
you have not listened to part one of How the
English Alphabet Became a thing, We're gonna pause and give
(01:57):
you a second to catch up before we dive into
modern English. We're gonna put some mustard on this one.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Ooh yeah, indeed, hopefully spicy brown. It's my favorite kind
of mustard.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
You know.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
And if you want to listen to the other one
after the fact, that's cool too, because we start kind
of right on modern English to Ben's point, which is
a spelling system that developed from around thirteen hundred and
fifty the year onwards.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yes, right, see. Indeed, when after three centuries of the
Norman French being in charge, English gradually became the official
language of the land that is England.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, it became the official language again, right again.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
But it was like when New.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Coke got rolled out, as a Coca Cola classic got
rolled out.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's not the same thing.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
The new English language is quite different from everything that
happened before about ten sixty six CE, and it incorporated
a lot of words from French origin. Later we will
call this phenomenon loan words. So, for instance, in this situation,
(03:17):
we see French origin words shout out to the Normans,
things like battle, beef, button, et cetera. You also see
it in modern English with things.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Like boondocks exactly, and I think we already know all
ridiculous historians included that the printing press was kind of
a big deal. I'll tell you what I didn't fully know,
or if I did, I maybe only partially knew and
then forgot how the printing press not only was a
big deal in the proliferation of language and of modern English,
(03:50):
but also like the words themselves, because some people got
paid by the length of words, and that kind of
stuck around. I thought that was really cool. We'll get
to that in the sense. William Kaxton is who we're
talking about today. Of course, the printing press was invented
by Johann Gutenberg in fourteen forty eight, but in Great Britain,
William Kaxton was responsible for bringing this technology around in
(04:14):
the mid fifteenth century. Oh yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
He brought it over the Channel. It was not a
clean process. They found the technology, they did not yet
have the uniformity or consistency of language. So when our
buddy Willie brings the concept or the technology of the
printing press to London, it's around fourteen seventy six, so
(04:39):
not too many decades after Gutenberg invents the printing press. Now,
our buddy Willy at this point is in a bit
of a pickle. He's been living in what we call
the continent continental Europe for more than thirty years. As
a result, he does not have an up to the
(05:00):
present day grasp of the English spelling system as they
would do it over the Channel. And further, he brings
a bunch of his assistants from Belgium. Those guys also
have no clue. They kind of freestyle what they think
(05:20):
words should sound like.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Absolutely. I mean, let's not forget. Language is its own
form of technology in a way, and it sometimes requires
a little bit of on the fly adjustments to make
it work. So let's add to that another little hiccup.
As printing developed and then the business of printing sprang up,
people started to develop a rather you know, companies organizations
(05:45):
started to develop their own signature preferences, a term that
sticks around today known as house styles, which you might
hear use for different magazines, for example, or different ad agencies.
They might have a house style. Then you can probably
shed a little bit more like on specifically what that means.
But my understanding is that has to do with maybe
the use of an Oxford Comma, for example, or like
(06:06):
how certain punctuations are used in the house style of
say Vanity Fair versus People Magazine.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Right, Yeah, it's like is this going to be a
U or a V? Right, because we're still in that
era of development. Also, I would like to point out
they said house styles instead of signature styles, because no
one could agree on how best do you spell the
word signature.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
And the houses in question are, of course, these printing houses.
These are literally various shops, you know, like and so
the term house styles gets taken and kind of use
for a broader sense, you know of like the signature
style of a different publication or like I said, an
advertising company to refer to. It can also refer to graphics,
or it can refer to color palettes or various different
(06:53):
things like that, house styleographies two hundred percent, how to
make citations, how to format footnote and things like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Yeah, and that gets in the weeds super easily. What
you need to know, folks, is the idea of generating
what we call modern English. While it is launched by
the amazing innovation of the printing press, it is complicated
by short term economic interests of the times. As you
(07:24):
noted NOL these type setters at these various different non unified,
not really a union at this point. These type setters
are all trying to make their own proprietary thing. And
the blokes who put the blocks in order to print
your local broadsheets, they got paid per line, so they
(07:47):
had a hard economic interest in making words longer because
it meant they made more money when they did.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
So. I just had no idea about this detail, and
I think it's so fascinating. How areary a lot of
the evolution of language tends to be. It's like holdovers
from people just making decisions that were relevant at the
time for very specific and often selfish reasons, but just
they just kind of stick around, like silent letters and
things like that that maybe were left over from old English.
(08:18):
They were just say, you know, what it benefits us
to have that silent h or what have you, you know,
in the middle of the word, so let's just leave it.
They were paid, like you said, by the line, that
kind of modern equivalent. I guess you might think about
it sort of the opposite, where if you're putting a
personals ad or an advertisement in a newspaper, you pay
by the word exactly, so you know, it behooves you
(08:40):
in that situation to err on the side of brevity,
being the soul of wit and all of that. So
it really is a pickle, Like you said, Ben, Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
A real bag of badger's there because we have to
exercise empathy. Imagine you're a type setter back in the
day and you say, oh, hey, most other print houses
are spelling this word something like through. For instance, they're
spelling it t h R e w A. What if
(09:14):
I spell it t h r o U g H
and get a little vigoroush. Right, Who am I to
argue with a greater good? It's a real bag of badgers.
The biggest changes in English spelling consistency. They occurred kind
of around the sixteenth century as well, because a guy
(09:36):
named William Tyndale translated the New Testament in fifteen thirty nine,
a guy named Henry the Eighth. Yes, that King Henry,
he said, very well, print thy Bibles in English in England.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, a bit of a best seller. Turned out that
the old New Testament, I mean, it's no Harry Potter. Well,
you know, it was sort of the Harry Potter of
its day. So that that led to numerous editions of
these Bibles. And it wasn't until I think we this
is pre King James, right, this is when, oh man,
I just mean in terms of standardization like this led
(10:17):
to a lot of different variations in print houses because
the King Henry basically just you know, lifted whatever moratorium
might have been on printing the sacred Word of God,
and that led to folks having their own house styles,
even for something as massive as the Bible.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
One hundred percent. Dude, the King James translation, it's commissioned
in sixteen oh four, it doesn't get printed until sixteen eleven.
So before King James, our buddy Henry is saying, look,
we need an English Bible in England because, as you said,
(10:55):
the differing versions or attempts to translate or commune unicate
the Christian Bible, they were all printed outside of England
by people who, and I'm not gonna be rude about this,
they spoke little to no English themselves.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
You know. It reminds me of there's this band that
I love, I think you're familiar with, to Ben King
Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. They do this really cool
thing where all of their records, of which they have
a gazillion. They make the masters available to anybody who
wants to make a version of it. So, like, you know,
if you are a small record printing company like LPs
(11:34):
UH and you want to design your own version of
a King Gizzard record, that is totally cool, which leads
to this proliferation. Likely nigh on impossible to track down
every version of their records, which is really really cool.
But obviously the records remains the same. In this case,
the actual contents were being styled on. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, it's similar to while we're praising contemporaries, it's similar
to how the amazing author Stephen King has what he
calls dollar babies. And if you are hearing this you're
an up and coming filmmaker, this is true. This is
still a real thing you can do. You can write
(12:17):
to Stephen King, or you know, more realistically, you can
write to his estate and you can say, I'd like
to adapt one of your stories for film, one of
your short stories. They will charge you one US dollar
because like King Gizzard and or The Lizard Wizard, the
(12:38):
guy just wants the story to be out there, and
that's what people are doing with this concept of the Bible,
the story of God and Jesus Christ. A lot of
the printers who are making copies translations of the Bible,
they are Dutch, and so being Dutch, they routinely change
(13:02):
the spelling of a word to match what makes sense
to them as Dutch speakers. And this is why we're
gonna put you on the game right here, ridiculous historians.
This is why you have so many h's going after
G in English. It's not because of English. It's because
(13:23):
of those Dutch folks who printed the Bibles. Like you,
you wouldn't say no, you wouldn't say the H after
ghosts or after the G and ghosts we do. I
do have to admit we both have a lot of
fun saying the H in whip.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Hip or how would you even say the agent ghost
the host that just becomes another word entirely aghast a
hurricane man. Actually I don't They're kind of gross. But
it's funny though, because all these silent letters. It's something
that I've always scratched my head about because it does
make learning English difficults. You know, people always say that
(14:05):
English is a difficult language to learn to speak, let alone,
right and it's because of a lot of these weird spellings.
And obviously, of course there are weird conjugations and things
like that that are not present in other languages. But
I think that kind of game of telephone, that is
the English language is largely what leads to that difficulty
for maybe new speakers to fully wrap their heads around it,
(14:27):
because sometimes we can't even wrap our heads around and
we've been speaking since we were little children.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
I'm still learning it. I wouldn't consider myself a native
speaking right.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
So back in the day, Europe overall, especially are good
friends in England, they got all these weird spellings and
they decided to let it ride.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
They were like, we're.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Cool, what's going on with how there's sometimes a V
and sometimes a you. It wasn't until the mid sixteenth
century that V and you became different distinct letters. You
became the vowel, V became the consonant. And it reminds
me of our earlier exploration this week, where remember how
(15:13):
we saw that the first alphabet ish thing only at consonants.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Right, Yeah, made it very gutturaled, and we talked about
that as well, that those vowels is really what makes
the kind of more flowing quality to language. So in
sixteen oh four Robert Quadry published the first English Dictionary,
and what's a dictionary if not an attempt to start
to codify some of this stuff by placing it all
(15:40):
in a single tome. This was called the table Alphabetical,
and around this time Jay was added to create the
modern English alphabet more or less that we know today
more I think, right? Is it pretty much the exact one?
It's closer and closer, broke. Yeah, we're getting there.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
We're getting We're edging toward the letters we know and love.
And we see each letter has its own origin, story,
its own providence and transformation over time. And this is true, folks.
These individual symbols would change position, they would flip around.
(16:20):
In some cases they got more flourishes, in other cases
they lost flourishes. I propose that we just run down
the list for funsies, you know, just to see how
ridiculous this is, and perhaps most importantly, to recognize that
(16:41):
no matter how static a given alphabet may appear to
be in your current time, they can always change.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, why don't mean to start at the beginning, huh?
With the old letter A I feel like we're on's street.
The original shape of the letter A was actually inverted,
so it looked kind of like the head of an
animal with horns and antlers. If you think about it, it
kind of looks something like a deer or a bull
even right. It was kind of fitting because in ancient
Semitic back to episode one, of course, the kind of
(17:17):
founders of the proto alphabet, the letter translated to ox.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, logograms, right, or idiograms. In some other parts of
the world. You see a drawing of an ox, of course,
it means ox, and then they flip it upside down
and now it's the letter A. If we go to B,
the letter B is fascinating because it's borrowed from the
(17:43):
pre existing Egyptian hieroglyphics, again logograms, and the letter was
originally resting on what we call its belly. Not to
anthropomorphize too much, but in its original shape, it looked
like a kid's draw of a house and it had
a door, and it had a roof, and it had
(18:04):
a room and kid, you know, folks, about four thousand
years ago, that symbol did not represent the sound be.
It represented the idea of shelter. It was rain of
a house.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Well, that's really neat, Ben, because we've talked about this
idea of hobo code hieroglyphs that traveling folks might use,
you know, to designate certain features of towns, and you know,
like routes and things like that, and a lot of
those do represent do look kind of like modern day
hieroglyphics orm you know, relatively modern speaking. But there's one
(18:39):
in particular that I really dig that represents safe, uh, safe,
safe haven. And it is kind of a lot like
a sort of stylized B, sometimes with little eyes in
the corners. So it's really neat the way this stuff
kind of proliferates and changes and gets repurposed, you know,
in various ways over time. So next up, obviously, next
thing is next we should go to the letter C.
(19:02):
The letter came from the Phoenicians once again, and it
was shaped a lot like a boomerang or something, you know,
like some sort of projectile. They had no idea what boomerang,
they certainly didn't, but it was like, you know, a
half moon, let's call it as well. They call it
like a hunting stick. There you go. The Greeks called
it Gamma, and flipped it to the direction that it's
written today, with the Italians giving it a bit more
(19:24):
of that half moon crescent shape.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
They curved it, they took out the they took out
the point there, and this is where we get to D.
Dallett is the name given to the letter D by
the Phoenicians round about eight hundred BCE. It looked like
at first a rough triangle, and where you see the
(19:47):
curve shape in a written letter D in modern English,
what you need to imagine is it's flipped and it's
a point y D facing left. The original meaning of
that that letter was door, so you would open the door.
And then the Greeks adopted, again appropriated this alphabet, and
(20:10):
they said, let's call it delta, and then they flipped it.
And then the Romans are the ones who said, he,
let's smooth out this point a little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Sure with the hands. They're doing the hand the whole time.
You know the symbol I mentioned a minute ago, the
hobocode for safe harbor. It also looks like a B
or a V or kind of an A where the
curves are removed and everything is just like a straight
kind of triangular shape with much more hard edges. So
(20:43):
moving past D, we are now of course onto E.
About thirty eight hundred years ago, the letter E was
pronounced more like an H sound, and that was again
in the Semitic language. It looked a lot like a
stick figure of a human with two arms. You can
kind of still see in the modern day equivalent for
some reason just had one leg, just the one, the one.
(21:05):
And in seven hundred BCE, the Greeks, once again there
are fans of the old flippity doo. They did just that,
and they change the pronunciation as well to a double
E sound, which I guess is like a like a
just knee sound, right.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So the way we would say E
phonetically sounds like e.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
This is also fascinating because Noel the idea when you
read it, the idea of an e pronounced as an
h in modern English, it feels counterintuitive. But everybody join
us together, say E, then say eh. Then hear that
h at the end. That's where they're going.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
That that's the evolution of this. And this takes us
to another counterintuitive pronunciation, the letter.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
F, one of my favorites in the whole alphabet. You
love F that's what. That's your pick of it. It's
got a good mouth sound. The letter F was also
from the Phoenicians, and it looked much more in that iteration,
like oh, why.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Shout out to the Welsh because we get it. I
was cracking on you guys earlier, but.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
I totally get it. Yeah. Then it was pronounced to
make a sound kind of more like a wah like wow,
kind of like Owen Wilson talks. The ancient Greeks renamed
it to uh digamma, digamma, I believe, and tips it
over a little bit to where it resembled more of
(22:34):
the present day F character. The Romans then made it
look even better by giving it a bit more of
a stylized geometric shape and then changing the official phonetic
sound to a good old yeah baby hm yeah, yeah,
not a raspberry sound, just just just just a hard F.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
No. Yeah, you have to be careful with the placement
of your tongue any humans tuning. And now we get
to the letter G, which weirdly enough comes from the
Zeta of the Greeks, Zeta we will call it. At first,
G looked like an I that maybe hadn't been working
out and the pronunciation made a zz sound. The Romans
(23:22):
took again a lot of stuff from the Greeks, and
around two point fifty BCE they said, all right, let's
differentiate this. We're gonna take this regular look and I
we're gonna give it a top arm, and we're gonna
give it a lower arm that later starts to look
kind of cradling like a hand, and we're gonna give
(23:42):
it a good sound. Latin didn't have a z sound.
So in the course of the development of the letter G,
those straight lines that were originally created they become curved again.
They we're seeing a rounding of things. This ends with
(24:04):
the present current crescent shape of the capital letter G.
And by the way, spoilers, folks, there's an entirely different
origin story for lowercase letters.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Oh yeah, we got that's a little outside of the scope,
I think in this conversation, because it's sometimes I've always wondered, like,
how do they get that from that? And I think
that is the question overall. And Ben, this does just
take a quick pause make me think of a sort
of a dumb question that I've often had. How come
if different countries and different cultures and different parts of
the world have different alphabet systems and different languages. How
(24:40):
come everybody agreed on the same depictions of numbers numbers Arabic? Yeah,
I get it, but I also the more I think
about it, the more it's like mathematics. It's a little
bit more indisputable. It's sort of based on at the
end of the day, like laws of nature and like,
you know, things that are kind of more concrete. Language
(25:01):
is something that's a lot easier to style on because
you don't really the math doesn't for lack of a
better term, have to work out in the end. So
there is a lot more kind of footloose and fancy
free styling when it comes to you know, what letters
look like and how words fit together. Whereas math, if
you kind of couldn't agree on math, and that would
cause a lot of problems.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Math is the underlying language of the reality in which
this podcast is created, such that if you met an
extra dimensional or extra terrestrial entity, your best bet in
communication would be mathematic principles.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
That's right. So moving away from math and moving on
to the letter H. This one comes from the Egyptians
and was used as a symbol for a fence which
you can totally see. It looks like it's right there.
It looks like you got the little the two pickets
I guess, and then the thing you know, holding them together,
and you could just continue to string the together and
(26:00):
surround your property to protect you from raiders or what happened.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Later boffins were total digs about it. Can I says
on a question?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
They do it?
Speaker 1 (26:12):
So they said, they said, look, this makes a breathy sound,
an exhalation, and so they said, we find this unnecessary.
Uh yeah, yeah, like a passive aggressive side. So British
and Latin scholars eventually for a time dropped the letter
H from the English alphabet entirely around five hundred CE.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
But look at it now, how far it's come. It
is the comeback kid. You need the H, they said.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And I don't know, we don't know if they if
they credited those early Dutch printers of the Bible.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Do you know how they say the letter H in
the UK? How h ah yes, h h yah. Yeah,
it's great, it makes perfect sense. It's a much better
indication of what it sounds like. But it always takes
me aback when I'm talking with British friends of mine,
and they say, hey, yeah, I know why I hear
a lot because in the modular synth community there's something
(27:14):
called HP which measures how wide a module is, and
so they're always saying hat HP HP.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
And speaking of these strange stories, folks, as you were
hearing us describe the evolution of the letter G, you
were probably wondering what happened to I. It's a question
that a lot of people ask themselves in the dark
of night. The letter I was originally back in one
(27:42):
thousand BCE called yad and it meant hand and arm.
The Greeks later called it iota and they made it vertical,
so it used to be horizontal like a double hyphen
and then the Greeks, you know, they're flipping house is
just like reality shows on HGTV. It turned eventually into
(28:06):
a straight line around seven hundred BCE, so G and
I become distinct different sounds.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
It's interesting too, because you know, obviously a lot of
this stuff descended from Semitic cultures that we've talked about,
and I was wondering, where have I heard yawd and
some of these other like alternate you know, past versions
of these letters, And that's it's from Hebrew. They still
exist some of these in Hebrew and yadd in the
Bible is actually a symbol of the Creator, and in
(28:39):
Jewish mysticism it's a very very important concept.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yes, yes, in Kabbala and other ancient teachings. We also,
I love that you're bringing that up, because we're also
going to look at the letter J, the letter the
new one, right, the new boy, yeah kid, the block
alphabetically on the printing press, on the printer block types
(29:04):
that block or whatever.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
We'll keep it max.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
The letter I used to be a stand in for
the sound in ancient times, and it got its shape
around the fourteen hundreds as a contribution of the Spanish language.
It wasn't until about sixteen forty when the letter J
(29:27):
regularly appeared in print. And I want to give a
shout out to all our fellow Espanol speakers. The best
way to say ha ha ha in internet discourse is jajaja.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
What I didn't know that. I'm gonna start pulling that
one out in my internet correspondence. Moving on to the
letter K. Another favorites good sound, good heart sound. When
paired with F. You know, you got to lead with
an F and then with a K. That's a fun word.
It's an old lest and it comes from the Egyptian
hieroglyphics system as well. In the Semitic language we were
(30:05):
just talking about giving credit to. It was given the
name kuff, which translates to palm of the hand. Yeah, exactly.
And what Ben's doing his hand right now, He's doing
a little flippy two of his hand. And in those times,
the letter faced once again the other way, and when
the Greeks adopted an eight hundred BCE, it became kappa.
A lot of these these these words might be familiar
(30:25):
to any uh, you know, any folks out there in
fraternities or sororities, of course. And they also then flipped
it to the rights.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, and if we move on, you know what, I
don't want anybody to take an L here, ah, So
let's explore it together. The present day letter L was
(30:55):
once upon a time what we would call upside down,
so it looked like a hooked letter, almost like the
way you would draw the old Hangman game.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Sure, yeah, the gallows, Yes, sir.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
It was already called L, which meant, you know, God,
the unnameable, the holy, and the Phoenicians said, all right,
first off, we're going to face this hook the other way.
They flipped it. They made it such that the hook
was facing left. They straightened the hook a bit. They
changed the name to lamed. And this was entirely just
(31:30):
like the earlier story with a boomerang or a hunting stick,
this was a goat prae. This was meant to beat
the snot out of goats.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Right, and then those eventually evolved into the electric versions
that we know today. I just I can't get over.
I mean, maybe this is just obvious to everybody but me,
but like, no, it's a little obvious to me too,
But just how so much of this stuff is just
a product of somebody making a decision in the moment
because it seemed like more aesthetically pleasing, you know, I
(31:59):
would are you also? It might be.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
It might be one of two factors. Either you have
a need to make your mark upon the world, make
your mark literally alphabets, or there was something more convenient
or more cost effective to do in terms of time.
And then a later civilization comes along, just like the
(32:23):
Greeks with the letter L, they call this stuff lambda,
and they turn it around again now it faces right
the final look of what we call the letter L today,
the one with the straight foot at a right angle,
that comes to us from the Romans.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
And yeah, which makes sense, I mean, because it's like
it's also like the most quintessential version of the L
I think we all think of and we're picturing it
is in that times new Roman fun the seraph being
the little the little uh what do you call it,
kind of flourish on the end of the footalk about it.
And also, I mean it really resembles kind of like
(33:02):
a Roman numeral in a way too. Moving on next,
back to the Egyptians, we've got the letter M. The
origin of M was kind of of the wavy vertical
lines with five peaks that would symbolize water at least
if you're Egyptians at least. Yeah, we're back with the
Egyptians again. In eighteen hundred BCE, the Semites simplified the
(33:24):
design a little bit, reduced it to three waves, and
then the Phoenicians removed one more of the waves, so
by eight hundred BCE the peaks were turned into zigzags
and then flipped horizontally to form what we know and
love today as the letter M.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
And that's why I was saying, we're getting into it
right over my head, budd We could do it for
the letter N, which is believe it or not, folks,
another Egyptian symbol. It originally looked like a small ripple
atop a larger ripple. It did not stand for water,
(34:02):
but it stood for something. Old fans of animals will
recognize our very fluid reptilian friends, the serpent, the snake,
the cobra. It was given the sound by ancient Semites,
and they said, you know, scales, this means fish.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
To us quo, I mean fish is a lot less scary.
I bet some people with with snake phobias might have
been spooked by that original version. I'm more frightened by
big fish than yeah, I guess that's true. So around
one thousand BCE, just one ripple appeared, and the Greeks
decided in their infinite wisdom to name it new Oh
(34:43):
and you like new metal, Oh, amazing genre from the
two thousands oh.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Letter that also came from the Egyptians as well. Originally,
all right, this makes sense to everyone. It was called
I the Egyptians and Iron Uh for the Semites. Pardon
the pronunciation.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
There.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
The Phoenicians took that hieroglyphic, that logogram, they further reduced
it and they just left the outline of the pupil.
So that is why the why we'll get to it.
That is why the oh became the sound it is
now instead of the eye. But originally it represented someone
(35:25):
looking at you.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Oh, exactly, yeah, uh huh. So moving on to P.
In the ancient Semitic language, today's letter P looked a
lot more like an inverted V. It was pronounced P
or pay maybe I think P, which meant mouth, and
the Phoenicians turned its top into a diagonal hook shape,
then into hundred BCE. The Romans, once again with their
(35:48):
there once again flipped crazy. These Romans flipped it to
the right and closed the loop to form the P,
the capital P that we know today.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Ooh, and now we're getting into the deep water. It's
just like if you are a student of the periodic
table in science. I noticed that at the end you
get to the real weird ones. This is the end
of the alphabet here.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
I love this stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
We'll keep it brief so that our producer Max does
not kill us. Q. The original sound of the letter
Q was like, help.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Me with this. When they'll quaff quote boy quoth, let's
see quoth. Maybe I don't know, there's not It's hard
to say because again we've got these silent letters sometimes
that make a wah or an o sound. I'm gonna
go with kof maybe even. But yeah, who are we
to say?
Speaker 1 (36:44):
If you have a Maryland accent, you would say queve uh.
This translates to a ball of wool or weirdly enough,
a monkey. It was originally a circle that was traversed
by a vertical line in inscriptions. Around five hundred and
twenty BCE, the letter started to appear as we know
(37:06):
it today. Now we got to get to our buddy,
the letter R.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Yes, indeed, the letter are. The profile of a human
facing left was originally the concept behind the letter R
as written by the Semites. Once again, it was pronounced
at that point rash, which meant head. The Romans once
again turned it to the right. Yeah, no way, Yeah,
(37:33):
they did it. They did it, those rascally Romans. And
they added an inclined foot so that kind of slanted
little little guy sticking his little foot out almost like
in a little I don't know, pirouette kind of gesture.
He said it in these das, it's like he's put
poking his leg out of his showing a little leg
out from under the skirt. There it is, look at
those gams.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
We also want to move to the letter S. R.
Palinol mentioned earlier the origin or evolution of the W.
The letter S used to look like a horizontal W,
but kind of wavy. It was supposed to mean the
bow of an archer. The angular nature of the shape
(38:15):
comes from the Phoenicians. They gave it the name ship
and in their language that translated to tooth. You're not
gonna believe it, folks. The Romans flipped it.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
How could they? Right? Unprecedented Romans, they're just flipping willy
and or nilly.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
They named it sigma. A lot of flippy doo on
their side, and.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
The gen Alpha kids love the sigma. Oh gosh, Ohio
shut up.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
The ancient Semites use the lower case form of the
letter T that you see today today.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
They called it tall, and the way that they would
announced it would sound like T, like golf T when
they spoke it aloud. The Greeks didn't know what was
going on, so they called it Tao, and they added
the cross at the top of the letter when it's
in capital form because they didn't want people to get
(39:17):
it confused with the letter X.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Moving on to the letter you and the numeral too.
For any negative land fans out there, the letter you
initially looked like why in one thousand BCE, and at
that time it was called wow. It was the wow
at that point that meant peg, because of course it didn't.
Under the Greeks, it was called oopsilon big oops.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
So now we get to again, we're getting to the
weird stuff at the end of the alphabet. The Romans
in their day, they used the letter V and you interchangeably.
This is part of why in episode one we said
V is a weird case study. The distinction between V
and other letters didn't start to appear until around the
(40:06):
fourteen hundred, so that's pretty recent in the grand scheme
of things. And this is where we get to a
great note of appreciation for all the folks who figured
out this alphabet beforehand. We could not be able to
pronounce the name of our super producer, Max Williams without
(40:27):
the work of the scribes of Charlemagne.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Indeed, and now we're finally getting that W. Ben. We
took an L earlier, and now we are going for
the W, which is also pretty recent because, as you
can imagine, ridiculous historians, it sort of says what it is,
it doesn't it. It sort of tells you exactly what
it is. It's like to u's side by side, thanks
to the scribes of Charlemagne. To your point, Ben, the
(40:53):
letter W started during the Middle Ages. It was initially
represented with two u's next to one another, separated by
a space at the time, like in emoji. Like just
so we're going to get to a little bit of
emoji talk at the end here too. At the time
the sound was a little bit closer to what we
might think of as a V sound, and the letter
then began to appear in print as a brand new
(41:16):
unique letter W like we know the W in seventeen hundred.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Seventeen hundred Common Era AD. This is where we get
to also, of course, X, the letter SI of the
ancient Greeks. The lowercase version was seen in handwritten manuscripts
during medieval times. Not the restaurant my favorite checked it
(41:41):
all right, I just know it from the cable guy.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
It's fun.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
We should we should take absolutely it'll be ironically fun.
And there's a bunch of printers in the late fourteen hundreds,
guys in Italy. They're using lowercase x's, And now I
would argue it is an integral part of every SoundCloud
rapper's MC name.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Not to mention, man, you pronounced that SI version with
the silent k on paper, it's KSI, and I kind
of wonder speaking of SoundCloud rapper types. I don't know
if you're familiar with this somewhat problematic YouTuber named KSI,
whose buddies with Jake Paul and all those rabbele rousers.
A bunch of bunch of kind of heels they are.
(42:26):
But he recently became the subject of some serious Internet
roasting with his new SoundCloud rapper esque song called in
the Thick of It, where he says something to the
effect of from the screen to the ring to the
pen to the king, something something something something that my bling.
You know, it's really really embarrassing. It sounds like a
backyard against theme song. So I hope that guy's doing okay.
(42:47):
He got pretty roasted and he just did the thing
you're not supposed to do where he just kept answering
the roasts and doubling down and then calling those people
big ol' meanies, and that they just didn't understand his genius.
So are the songs good?
Speaker 1 (42:59):
No?
Speaker 2 (42:59):
No, ks I, I hope you're okay. Here's to the
here's to the next song.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
But you know, there's always an opportunity, right, Everything has
a future, especially the letter why we mentioned this, you're right,
started out as upsilon or upsilon. It was added by
the Romans one ce. Now we got to go to
z Phoenicians back in the day again, as you can tell,
(43:29):
ridiculous historians, they were a big deal.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
They had a letter.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Called Zion and it meant acts z A Y I N.
We would spell it phonetically now phoenicianally now uh. It
first looked like the letter I, and it just had
some fancy flourishes, some seraphs at the top and bottom,
little daily bops. The Greeks adopted it as zeta and
(43:53):
they gave it the sound yeah zip yeah, and it
was it used for several centuries until the Normans invaded
what we call the United Kingdom today and they said, hey,
we have a language that needs the sound of the
(44:14):
letter or needs the sound, and that's how we got Z.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Yeah exactly, and that's how we wrap up this discussion
of the English alphabet. Man I kind of teased that, Ben,
so I don't want to leave the folks at home
without a dope beat to steps up too. We just
talked about a little bit briefly just how so many
of these things were derived initially from kind of emoji
like symbols and then kind of came to be repurposed
(44:40):
as phonetic sounds. We have whole cultures that use symbols
to represent concepts, and Ben, you pointed out in your
incredible outline here, and I completely agree that it feels
as though we might be heading towards the future where
the written word is kind of continuing to be dumbed
down and may well be going the way of the
(45:00):
dinosaurs in favor of emojis, which honestly, there's a benefit
there because they are universally understandable and there is dictated,
I guess by the powers that be at Apple, sort
of an emoji alphabet. They decide which ones go in,
which ones don't, and which new ones get added. And
I've always wonder what the politics of that is. It's
got to be fascinating.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yeah, many variables evolved. Now, First, good news for every
writer and ardent reader in the crowd. The written word
never goes away. It may evolve over time, however, the
horse has left the barn. As far as human communication goes,
Emoji are simple drawings pictures of anything you might imagine,
(45:45):
often used in place of words written in different alphabets
to convey ideas. Visually, everything we said about writing holds
true for emojis. Again, name check to or shout out
to Episode one. Entire novels have been written in emoji
as we speak, So it is not impossible to imagine
(46:07):
a world wherein these symbols become their own kind of language.
And the beautiful thing about this, the beautiful thing about
the human experiment, is that this could unify people, right,
could reduce friction and conversation. Someone who is a native
Mandarin speaker or someone who is speaking Cantonese, they can
(46:29):
interact with someone who speaks English just through emojis. Now,
they're gonna miss a lot of nuance.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Sure, it's what I mean.
Speaker 5 (46:38):
We're not really living in a time of great nuance,
though I would argue you unfortunately things are a little
bit more of a blunt instrument in terms of language,
you know, for better or for worse, though, it is
another evolution and whether you're on board with it or not,
it is something that's fascinating to track.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
And with this we thank you, fellow Ridiculous Historian, so
much as always for tuning in. We're at the end
of the calendar year, as the humans call it. Shout
out to our super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Max the Phoenician Williams. That's his gangster name. Huge thanks
to you is Chris Fraciota's names Jeff Coates here in spirits.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Alex Williams, who composed this bang and track our fellow
rude dudes over at Ridiculous Crime. Check out their show.
If you like us, you'll love them.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
Indeed, did we say Alex Williams to compose our theme?
We did? Okay, Well, that's so she's so rad We
said it twice. That isn't rhyme, but that's okay. Thanks
to you, Ben for putting together this incredible two parter
on the history of the English language. That's no small feat.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
And you did it with Flair, Hey Noel, and also
with you, I owe you and sometimes why I saved
that joke for way too long.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
I think we made it at the very top. I
said we owe each other in fact, get it. Yeah,
I'm doing a vowel joke. Aha. I see, We'll circle.
I love it. We'll see you next time, folks. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(48:10):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Ridiculous Histories, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show,
(00:28):
fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much for
tuning in. This is the second part of our episode
on the weird weird story of how the modern English
alphabet became a thing. So on a personal message, I
owe you and sometimes why our.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
You owe me? We owe each other the world.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
Yes, it's true, and that's our super producer, mister Max Williams.
That's the main man, our pal, mister Noel Brown. Helloh,
they called me ben Bollen in many parts of the world.
And no h for anybody who is tuning in. Now,
what did we learn in our previous exploration of the
(01:17):
English alphabet?
Speaker 2 (01:19):
Oh? Boy, where to even start? We learned that Chaucer
was a saucy boy. He liked butts and talking funny.
And we learned that Max has a real talent for
voice acting. Those are my two major takeaways.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
M Yeah, and those are great things to take away
from the first episode and to take with us in
the second episode. Fellow Ridiculous Historians, Please, please please, if
you have not listened to part one of How the
English Alphabet Became a thing, We're gonna pause and give
(01:57):
you a second to catch up before we dive into
modern English. We're gonna put some mustard on this one.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Ooh yeah, indeed, hopefully spicy brown. It's my favorite kind
of mustard.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
You know.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
And if you want to listen to the other one
after the fact, that's cool too, because we start kind
of right on modern English to Ben's point, which is
a spelling system that developed from around thirteen hundred and
fifty the year onwards.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yes, right, see. Indeed, when after three centuries of the
Norman French being in charge, English gradually became the official
language of the land that is England.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
Yeah, it became the official language again, right again.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
But it was like when New.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Coke got rolled out, as a Coca Cola classic got
rolled out.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's not the same thing.
Speaker 1 (02:55):
The new English language is quite different from everything that
happened before about ten sixty six CE, and it incorporated
a lot of words from French origin. Later we will
call this phenomenon loan words. So, for instance, in this situation,
(03:17):
we see French origin words shout out to the Normans,
things like battle, beef, button, et cetera. You also see
it in modern English with things.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Like boondocks exactly, and I think we already know all
ridiculous historians included that the printing press was kind of
a big deal. I'll tell you what I didn't fully know,
or if I did, I maybe only partially knew and
then forgot how the printing press not only was a
big deal in the proliferation of language and of modern English,
(03:50):
but also like the words themselves, because some people got
paid by the length of words, and that kind of
stuck around. I thought that was really cool. We'll get
to that in the sense. William Kaxton is who we're
talking about today. Of course, the printing press was invented
by Johann Gutenberg in fourteen forty eight, but in Great Britain,
William Kaxton was responsible for bringing this technology around in
(04:14):
the mid fifteenth century. Oh yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
He brought it over the Channel. It was not a
clean process. They found the technology, they did not yet
have the uniformity or consistency of language. So when our
buddy Willie brings the concept or the technology of the
printing press to London, it's around fourteen seventy six, so
(04:39):
not too many decades after Gutenberg invents the printing press. Now,
our buddy Willy at this point is in a bit
of a pickle. He's been living in what we call
the continent continental Europe for more than thirty years. As
a result, he does not have an up to the
(05:00):
present day grasp of the English spelling system as they
would do it over the Channel. And further, he brings
a bunch of his assistants from Belgium. Those guys also
have no clue. They kind of freestyle what they think
(05:20):
words should sound like.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Absolutely. I mean, let's not forget. Language is its own
form of technology in a way, and it sometimes requires
a little bit of on the fly adjustments to make
it work. So let's add to that another little hiccup.
As printing developed and then the business of printing sprang up,
people started to develop a rather you know, companies organizations
(05:45):
started to develop their own signature preferences, a term that
sticks around today known as house styles, which you might
hear use for different magazines, for example, or different ad agencies.
They might have a house style. Then you can probably
shed a little bit more like on specifically what that means.
But my understanding is that has to do with maybe
the use of an Oxford Comma, for example, or like
(06:06):
how certain punctuations are used in the house style of
say Vanity Fair versus People Magazine.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
Right, Yeah, it's like is this going to be a
U or a V? Right, because we're still in that
era of development. Also, I would like to point out
they said house styles instead of signature styles, because no
one could agree on how best do you spell the
word signature.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
And the houses in question are, of course, these printing houses.
These are literally various shops, you know, like and so
the term house styles gets taken and kind of use
for a broader sense, you know of like the signature
style of a different publication or like I said, an
advertising company to refer to. It can also refer to graphics,
or it can refer to color palettes or various different
(06:53):
things like that, house styleographies two hundred percent, how to
make citations, how to format footnote and things like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Yeah, and that gets in the weeds super easily. What
you need to know, folks, is the idea of generating
what we call modern English. While it is launched by
the amazing innovation of the printing press, it is complicated
by short term economic interests of the times. As you
(07:24):
noted NOL these type setters at these various different non unified,
not really a union at this point. These type setters
are all trying to make their own proprietary thing. And
the blokes who put the blocks in order to print
your local broadsheets, they got paid per line, so they
(07:47):
had a hard economic interest in making words longer because
it meant they made more money when they did.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
So. I just had no idea about this detail, and
I think it's so fascinating. How areary a lot of
the evolution of language tends to be. It's like holdovers
from people just making decisions that were relevant at the
time for very specific and often selfish reasons, but just
they just kind of stick around, like silent letters and
things like that that maybe were left over from old English.
(08:18):
They were just say, you know, what it benefits us
to have that silent h or what have you, you know,
in the middle of the word, so let's just leave it.
They were paid, like you said, by the line, that
kind of modern equivalent. I guess you might think about
it sort of the opposite, where if you're putting a
personals ad or an advertisement in a newspaper, you pay
by the word exactly, so you know, it behooves you
(08:40):
in that situation to err on the side of brevity,
being the soul of wit and all of that. So
it really is a pickle, Like you said, Ben, Yeah, it's.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
A real bag of badger's there because we have to
exercise empathy. Imagine you're a type setter back in the
day and you say, oh, hey, most other print houses
are spelling this word something like through. For instance, they're
spelling it t h R e w A. What if
(09:14):
I spell it t h r o U g H
and get a little vigoroush. Right, Who am I to
argue with a greater good? It's a real bag of badgers.
The biggest changes in English spelling consistency. They occurred kind
of around the sixteenth century as well, because a guy
(09:36):
named William Tyndale translated the New Testament in fifteen thirty nine,
a guy named Henry the Eighth. Yes, that King Henry,
he said, very well, print thy Bibles in English in England.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
Yeah, a bit of a best seller. Turned out that
the old New Testament, I mean, it's no Harry Potter. Well,
you know, it was sort of the Harry Potter of
its day. So that that led to numerous editions of
these Bibles. And it wasn't until I think we this
is pre King James, right, this is when, oh man,
I just mean in terms of standardization like this led
(10:17):
to a lot of different variations in print houses because
the King Henry basically just you know, lifted whatever moratorium
might have been on printing the sacred Word of God,
and that led to folks having their own house styles,
even for something as massive as the Bible.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
One hundred percent. Dude, the King James translation, it's commissioned
in sixteen oh four, it doesn't get printed until sixteen eleven.
So before King James, our buddy Henry is saying, look,
we need an English Bible in England because, as you said,
(10:55):
the differing versions or attempts to translate or commune unicate
the Christian Bible, they were all printed outside of England
by people who, and I'm not gonna be rude about this,
they spoke little to no English themselves.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
You know. It reminds me of there's this band that
I love, I think you're familiar with, to Ben King
Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. They do this really cool
thing where all of their records, of which they have
a gazillion. They make the masters available to anybody who
wants to make a version of it. So, like, you know,
if you are a small record printing company like LPs
(11:34):
UH and you want to design your own version of
a King Gizzard record, that is totally cool, which leads
to this proliferation. Likely nigh on impossible to track down
every version of their records, which is really really cool.
But obviously the records remains the same. In this case,
the actual contents were being styled on. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:55):
Yeah, it's similar to while we're praising contemporaries, it's similar
to how the amazing author Stephen King has what he
calls dollar babies. And if you are hearing this you're
an up and coming filmmaker, this is true. This is
still a real thing you can do. You can write
(12:17):
to Stephen King, or you know, more realistically, you can
write to his estate and you can say, I'd like
to adapt one of your stories for film, one of
your short stories. They will charge you one US dollar
because like King Gizzard and or The Lizard Wizard, the
(12:38):
guy just wants the story to be out there, and
that's what people are doing with this concept of the Bible,
the story of God and Jesus Christ. A lot of
the printers who are making copies translations of the Bible,
they are Dutch, and so being Dutch, they routinely change
(13:02):
the spelling of a word to match what makes sense
to them as Dutch speakers. And this is why we're
gonna put you on the game right here, ridiculous historians.
This is why you have so many h's going after
G in English. It's not because of English. It's because
(13:23):
of those Dutch folks who printed the Bibles. Like you,
you wouldn't say no, you wouldn't say the H after
ghosts or after the G and ghosts we do. I
do have to admit we both have a lot of
fun saying the H in whip.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Hip or how would you even say the agent ghost
the host that just becomes another word entirely aghast a
hurricane man. Actually I don't They're kind of gross. But
it's funny though, because all these silent letters. It's something
that I've always scratched my head about because it does
make learning English difficults. You know, people always say that
(14:05):
English is a difficult language to learn to speak, let alone,
right and it's because of a lot of these weird spellings.
And obviously, of course there are weird conjugations and things
like that that are not present in other languages. But
I think that kind of game of telephone, that is
the English language is largely what leads to that difficulty
for maybe new speakers to fully wrap their heads around it,
(14:27):
because sometimes we can't even wrap our heads around and
we've been speaking since we were little children.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
I'm still learning it. I wouldn't consider myself a native
speaking right.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
So back in the day, Europe overall, especially are good
friends in England, they got all these weird spellings and
they decided to let it ride.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
They were like, we're.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
Cool, what's going on with how there's sometimes a V
and sometimes a you. It wasn't until the mid sixteenth
century that V and you became different distinct letters. You
became the vowel, V became the consonant. And it reminds
me of our earlier exploration this week, where remember how
(15:13):
we saw that the first alphabet ish thing only at consonants.
Speaker 2 (15:20):
Right, Yeah, made it very gutturaled, and we talked about
that as well, that those vowels is really what makes
the kind of more flowing quality to language. So in
sixteen oh four Robert Quadry published the first English Dictionary,
and what's a dictionary if not an attempt to start
to codify some of this stuff by placing it all
(15:40):
in a single tome. This was called the table Alphabetical,
and around this time Jay was added to create the
modern English alphabet more or less that we know today
more I think, right? Is it pretty much the exact one?
It's closer and closer, broke. Yeah, we're getting there.
Speaker 1 (15:58):
We're getting We're edging toward the letters we know and love.
And we see each letter has its own origin, story,
its own providence and transformation over time. And this is true, folks.
These individual symbols would change position, they would flip around.
(16:20):
In some cases they got more flourishes, in other cases
they lost flourishes. I propose that we just run down
the list for funsies, you know, just to see how
ridiculous this is, and perhaps most importantly, to recognize that
(16:41):
no matter how static a given alphabet may appear to
be in your current time, they can always change.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, why don't mean to start at the beginning, huh?
With the old letter A I feel like we're on's street.
The original shape of the letter A was actually inverted,
so it looked kind of like the head of an
animal with horns and antlers. If you think about it, it
kind of looks something like a deer or a bull
even right. It was kind of fitting because in ancient
Semitic back to episode one, of course, the kind of
(17:17):
founders of the proto alphabet, the letter translated to ox.
Speaker 1 (17:22):
Yeah, logograms, right, or idiograms. In some other parts of
the world. You see a drawing of an ox, of course,
it means ox, and then they flip it upside down
and now it's the letter A. If we go to B,
the letter B is fascinating because it's borrowed from the
(17:43):
pre existing Egyptian hieroglyphics, again logograms, and the letter was
originally resting on what we call its belly. Not to
anthropomorphize too much, but in its original shape, it looked
like a kid's draw of a house and it had
a door, and it had a roof, and it had
(18:04):
a room and kid, you know, folks, about four thousand
years ago, that symbol did not represent the sound be.
It represented the idea of shelter. It was rain of
a house.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Well, that's really neat, Ben, because we've talked about this
idea of hobo code hieroglyphs that traveling folks might use,
you know, to designate certain features of towns, and you know,
like routes and things like that, and a lot of
those do represent do look kind of like modern day
hieroglyphics orm you know, relatively modern speaking. But there's one
(18:39):
in particular that I really dig that represents safe, uh, safe,
safe haven. And it is kind of a lot like
a sort of stylized B, sometimes with little eyes in
the corners. So it's really neat the way this stuff
kind of proliferates and changes and gets repurposed, you know,
in various ways over time. So next up, obviously, next
thing is next we should go to the letter C.
(19:02):
The letter came from the Phoenicians once again, and it
was shaped a lot like a boomerang or something, you know,
like some sort of projectile. They had no idea what boomerang,
they certainly didn't, but it was like, you know, a
half moon, let's call it as well. They call it
like a hunting stick. There you go. The Greeks called
it Gamma, and flipped it to the direction that it's
written today, with the Italians giving it a bit more
(19:24):
of that half moon crescent shape.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
They curved it, they took out the they took out
the point there, and this is where we get to D.
Dallett is the name given to the letter D by
the Phoenicians round about eight hundred BCE. It looked like
at first a rough triangle, and where you see the
(19:47):
curve shape in a written letter D in modern English,
what you need to imagine is it's flipped and it's
a point y D facing left. The original meaning of
that that letter was door, so you would open the door.
And then the Greeks adopted, again appropriated this alphabet, and
(20:10):
they said, let's call it delta, and then they flipped it.
And then the Romans are the ones who said, he,
let's smooth out this point a little bit.
Speaker 2 (20:22):
Sure with the hands. They're doing the hand the whole time.
You know the symbol I mentioned a minute ago, the
hobocode for safe harbor. It also looks like a B
or a V or kind of an A where the
curves are removed and everything is just like a straight
kind of triangular shape with much more hard edges. So
(20:43):
moving past D, we are now of course onto E.
About thirty eight hundred years ago, the letter E was
pronounced more like an H sound, and that was again
in the Semitic language. It looked a lot like a
stick figure of a human with two arms. You can
kind of still see in the modern day equivalent for
some reason just had one leg, just the one, the one.
(21:05):
And in seven hundred BCE, the Greeks, once again there
are fans of the old flippity doo. They did just that,
and they change the pronunciation as well to a double
E sound, which I guess is like a like a
just knee sound, right.
Speaker 1 (21:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So the way we would say E
phonetically sounds like e.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
This is also fascinating because Noel the idea when you
read it, the idea of an e pronounced as an
h in modern English, it feels counterintuitive. But everybody join
us together, say E, then say eh. Then hear that
h at the end. That's where they're going.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
That that's the evolution of this. And this takes us
to another counterintuitive pronunciation, the letter.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
F, one of my favorites in the whole alphabet. You
love F that's what. That's your pick of it. It's
got a good mouth sound. The letter F was also
from the Phoenicians, and it looked much more in that iteration,
like oh, why.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Shout out to the Welsh because we get it. I
was cracking on you guys earlier, but.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
I totally get it. Yeah. Then it was pronounced to
make a sound kind of more like a wah like wow,
kind of like Owen Wilson talks. The ancient Greeks renamed
it to uh digamma, digamma, I believe, and tips it
over a little bit to where it resembled more of
(22:34):
the present day F character. The Romans then made it
look even better by giving it a bit more of
a stylized geometric shape and then changing the official phonetic
sound to a good old yeah baby hm yeah, yeah,
not a raspberry sound, just just just just a hard F.
Speaker 1 (22:54):
No. Yeah, you have to be careful with the placement
of your tongue any humans tuning. And now we get
to the letter G, which weirdly enough comes from the
Zeta of the Greeks, Zeta we will call it. At first,
G looked like an I that maybe hadn't been working
out and the pronunciation made a zz sound. The Romans
(23:22):
took again a lot of stuff from the Greeks, and
around two point fifty BCE they said, all right, let's
differentiate this. We're gonna take this regular look and I
we're gonna give it a top arm, and we're gonna
give it a lower arm that later starts to look
kind of cradling like a hand, and we're gonna give
(23:42):
it a good sound. Latin didn't have a z sound.
So in the course of the development of the letter G,
those straight lines that were originally created they become curved again.
They we're seeing a rounding of things. This ends with
(24:04):
the present current crescent shape of the capital letter G.
And by the way, spoilers, folks, there's an entirely different
origin story for lowercase letters.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
Oh yeah, we got that's a little outside of the scope,
I think in this conversation, because it's sometimes I've always wondered, like,
how do they get that from that? And I think
that is the question overall. And Ben, this does just
take a quick pause make me think of a sort
of a dumb question that I've often had. How come
if different countries and different cultures and different parts of
the world have different alphabet systems and different languages. How
(24:40):
come everybody agreed on the same depictions of numbers numbers Arabic? Yeah,
I get it, but I also the more I think
about it, the more it's like mathematics. It's a little
bit more indisputable. It's sort of based on at the
end of the day, like laws of nature and like,
you know, things that are kind of more concrete. Language
(25:01):
is something that's a lot easier to style on because
you don't really the math doesn't for lack of a
better term, have to work out in the end. So
there is a lot more kind of footloose and fancy
free styling when it comes to you know, what letters
look like and how words fit together. Whereas math, if
you kind of couldn't agree on math, and that would
cause a lot of problems.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
Math is the underlying language of the reality in which
this podcast is created, such that if you met an
extra dimensional or extra terrestrial entity, your best bet in
communication would be mathematic principles.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
That's right. So moving away from math and moving on
to the letter H. This one comes from the Egyptians
and was used as a symbol for a fence which
you can totally see. It looks like it's right there.
It looks like you got the little the two pickets
I guess, and then the thing you know, holding them together,
and you could just continue to string the together and
(26:00):
surround your property to protect you from raiders or what happened.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Later boffins were total digs about it. Can I says
on a question?
Speaker 2 (26:11):
They do it?
Speaker 1 (26:12):
So they said, they said, look, this makes a breathy sound,
an exhalation, and so they said, we find this unnecessary.
Uh yeah, yeah, like a passive aggressive side. So British
and Latin scholars eventually for a time dropped the letter
H from the English alphabet entirely around five hundred CE.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
But look at it now, how far it's come. It
is the comeback kid. You need the H, they said.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
And I don't know, we don't know if they if
they credited those early Dutch printers of the Bible.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Do you know how they say the letter H in
the UK? How h ah yes, h h yah. Yeah,
it's great, it makes perfect sense. It's a much better
indication of what it sounds like. But it always takes
me aback when I'm talking with British friends of mine,
and they say, hey, yeah, I know why I hear
a lot because in the modular synth community there's something
(27:14):
called HP which measures how wide a module is, and
so they're always saying hat HP HP.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
And speaking of these strange stories, folks, as you were
hearing us describe the evolution of the letter G, you
were probably wondering what happened to I. It's a question
that a lot of people ask themselves in the dark
of night. The letter I was originally back in one
(27:42):
thousand BCE called yad and it meant hand and arm.
The Greeks later called it iota and they made it vertical,
so it used to be horizontal like a double hyphen
and then the Greeks, you know, they're flipping house is
just like reality shows on HGTV. It turned eventually into
(28:06):
a straight line around seven hundred BCE, so G and
I become distinct different sounds.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
It's interesting too, because you know, obviously a lot of
this stuff descended from Semitic cultures that we've talked about,
and I was wondering, where have I heard yawd and
some of these other like alternate you know, past versions
of these letters, And that's it's from Hebrew. They still
exist some of these in Hebrew and yadd in the
Bible is actually a symbol of the Creator, and in
(28:39):
Jewish mysticism it's a very very important concept.
Speaker 1 (28:43):
Yes, yes, in Kabbala and other ancient teachings. We also,
I love that you're bringing that up, because we're also
going to look at the letter J, the letter the
new one, right, the new boy, yeah kid, the block
alphabetically on the printing press, on the printer block types
(29:04):
that block or whatever.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
We'll keep it max.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
The letter I used to be a stand in for
the sound in ancient times, and it got its shape
around the fourteen hundreds as a contribution of the Spanish language.
It wasn't until about sixteen forty when the letter J
(29:27):
regularly appeared in print. And I want to give a
shout out to all our fellow Espanol speakers. The best
way to say ha ha ha in internet discourse is jajaja.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
What I didn't know that. I'm gonna start pulling that
one out in my internet correspondence. Moving on to the
letter K. Another favorites good sound, good heart sound. When
paired with F. You know, you got to lead with
an F and then with a K. That's a fun word.
It's an old lest and it comes from the Egyptian
hieroglyphics system as well. In the Semitic language we were
(30:05):
just talking about giving credit to. It was given the
name kuff, which translates to palm of the hand. Yeah, exactly.
And what Ben's doing his hand right now, He's doing
a little flippy two of his hand. And in those times,
the letter faced once again the other way, and when
the Greeks adopted an eight hundred BCE, it became kappa.
A lot of these these these words might be familiar
(30:25):
to any uh, you know, any folks out there in
fraternities or sororities, of course. And they also then flipped
it to the rights.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, and if we move on, you know what, I
don't want anybody to take an L here, ah, So
let's explore it together. The present day letter L was
(30:55):
once upon a time what we would call upside down,
so it looked like a hooked letter, almost like the
way you would draw the old Hangman game.
Speaker 2 (31:05):
Sure, yeah, the gallows, Yes, sir.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
It was already called L, which meant, you know, God,
the unnameable, the holy, and the Phoenicians said, all right,
first off, we're going to face this hook the other way.
They flipped it. They made it such that the hook
was facing left. They straightened the hook a bit. They
changed the name to lamed. And this was entirely just
(31:30):
like the earlier story with a boomerang or a hunting stick,
this was a goat prae. This was meant to beat
the snot out of goats.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
Right, and then those eventually evolved into the electric versions
that we know today. I just I can't get over.
I mean, maybe this is just obvious to everybody but me,
but like, no, it's a little obvious to me too,
But just how so much of this stuff is just
a product of somebody making a decision in the moment
because it seemed like more aesthetically pleasing, you know, I
(31:59):
would are you also? It might be.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
It might be one of two factors. Either you have
a need to make your mark upon the world, make
your mark literally alphabets, or there was something more convenient
or more cost effective to do in terms of time.
And then a later civilization comes along, just like the
(32:23):
Greeks with the letter L, they call this stuff lambda,
and they turn it around again now it faces right
the final look of what we call the letter L today,
the one with the straight foot at a right angle,
that comes to us from the Romans.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
And yeah, which makes sense, I mean, because it's like
it's also like the most quintessential version of the L
I think we all think of and we're picturing it
is in that times new Roman fun the seraph being
the little the little uh what do you call it,
kind of flourish on the end of the footalk about it.
And also, I mean it really resembles kind of like
(33:02):
a Roman numeral in a way too. Moving on next,
back to the Egyptians, we've got the letter M. The
origin of M was kind of of the wavy vertical
lines with five peaks that would symbolize water at least
if you're Egyptians at least. Yeah, we're back with the
Egyptians again. In eighteen hundred BCE, the Semites simplified the
(33:24):
design a little bit, reduced it to three waves, and
then the Phoenicians removed one more of the waves, so
by eight hundred BCE the peaks were turned into zigzags
and then flipped horizontally to form what we know and
love today as the letter M.
Speaker 1 (33:41):
And that's why I was saying, we're getting into it
right over my head, budd We could do it for
the letter N, which is believe it or not, folks,
another Egyptian symbol. It originally looked like a small ripple
atop a larger ripple. It did not stand for water,
(34:02):
but it stood for something. Old fans of animals will
recognize our very fluid reptilian friends, the serpent, the snake,
the cobra. It was given the sound by ancient Semites,
and they said, you know, scales, this means fish.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
To us quo, I mean fish is a lot less scary.
I bet some people with with snake phobias might have
been spooked by that original version. I'm more frightened by
big fish than yeah, I guess that's true. So around
one thousand BCE, just one ripple appeared, and the Greeks
decided in their infinite wisdom to name it new Oh
(34:43):
and you like new metal, Oh, amazing genre from the
two thousands oh.
Speaker 1 (34:50):
Letter that also came from the Egyptians as well. Originally,
all right, this makes sense to everyone. It was called
I the Egyptians and Iron Uh for the Semites. Pardon
the pronunciation.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
There.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
The Phoenicians took that hieroglyphic, that logogram, they further reduced
it and they just left the outline of the pupil.
So that is why the why we'll get to it.
That is why the oh became the sound it is
now instead of the eye. But originally it represented someone
(35:25):
looking at you.
Speaker 2 (35:26):
Oh, exactly, yeah, uh huh. So moving on to P.
In the ancient Semitic language, today's letter P looked a
lot more like an inverted V. It was pronounced P
or pay maybe I think P, which meant mouth, and
the Phoenicians turned its top into a diagonal hook shape,
then into hundred BCE. The Romans, once again with their
(35:48):
there once again flipped crazy. These Romans flipped it to
the right and closed the loop to form the P,
the capital P that we know today.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
Ooh, and now we're getting into the deep water. It's
just like if you are a student of the periodic
table in science. I noticed that at the end you
get to the real weird ones. This is the end
of the alphabet here.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
I love this stuff.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
We'll keep it brief so that our producer Max does
not kill us. Q. The original sound of the letter
Q was like, help.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Me with this. When they'll quaff quote boy quoth, let's
see quoth. Maybe I don't know, there's not It's hard
to say because again we've got these silent letters sometimes
that make a wah or an o sound. I'm gonna
go with kof maybe even. But yeah, who are we
to say?
Speaker 1 (36:44):
If you have a Maryland accent, you would say queve uh.
This translates to a ball of wool or weirdly enough,
a monkey. It was originally a circle that was traversed
by a vertical line in inscriptions. Around five hundred and
twenty BCE, the letter started to appear as we know
(37:06):
it today. Now we got to get to our buddy,
the letter R.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Yes, indeed, the letter are. The profile of a human
facing left was originally the concept behind the letter R
as written by the Semites. Once again, it was pronounced
at that point rash, which meant head. The Romans once
again turned it to the right. Yeah, no way, Yeah,
(37:33):
they did it. They did it, those rascally Romans. And
they added an inclined foot so that kind of slanted
little little guy sticking his little foot out almost like
in a little I don't know, pirouette kind of gesture.
He said it in these das, it's like he's put
poking his leg out of his showing a little leg
out from under the skirt. There it is, look at
those gams.
Speaker 1 (37:53):
We also want to move to the letter S. R.
Palinol mentioned earlier the origin or evolution of the W.
The letter S used to look like a horizontal W,
but kind of wavy. It was supposed to mean the
bow of an archer. The angular nature of the shape
(38:15):
comes from the Phoenicians. They gave it the name ship
and in their language that translated to tooth. You're not
gonna believe it, folks. The Romans flipped it.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
How could they? Right? Unprecedented Romans, they're just flipping willy
and or nilly.
Speaker 4 (38:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
They named it sigma. A lot of flippy doo on
their side, and.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
The gen Alpha kids love the sigma. Oh gosh, Ohio
shut up.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
The ancient Semites use the lower case form of the
letter T that you see today today.
Speaker 2 (38:55):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
They called it tall, and the way that they would
announced it would sound like T, like golf T when
they spoke it aloud. The Greeks didn't know what was
going on, so they called it Tao, and they added
the cross at the top of the letter when it's
in capital form because they didn't want people to get
(39:17):
it confused with the letter X.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Moving on to the letter you and the numeral too.
For any negative land fans out there, the letter you
initially looked like why in one thousand BCE, and at
that time it was called wow. It was the wow
at that point that meant peg, because of course it didn't.
Under the Greeks, it was called oopsilon big oops.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
So now we get to again, we're getting to the
weird stuff at the end of the alphabet. The Romans
in their day, they used the letter V and you interchangeably.
This is part of why in episode one we said
V is a weird case study. The distinction between V
and other letters didn't start to appear until around the
(40:06):
fourteen hundred, so that's pretty recent in the grand scheme
of things. And this is where we get to a
great note of appreciation for all the folks who figured
out this alphabet beforehand. We could not be able to
pronounce the name of our super producer, Max Williams without
(40:27):
the work of the scribes of Charlemagne.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
Indeed, and now we're finally getting that W. Ben. We
took an L earlier, and now we are going for
the W, which is also pretty recent because, as you
can imagine, ridiculous historians, it sort of says what it is,
it doesn't it. It sort of tells you exactly what
it is. It's like to u's side by side, thanks
to the scribes of Charlemagne. To your point, Ben, the
(40:53):
letter W started during the Middle Ages. It was initially
represented with two u's next to one another, separated by
a space at the time, like in emoji. Like just
so we're going to get to a little bit of
emoji talk at the end here too. At the time
the sound was a little bit closer to what we
might think of as a V sound, and the letter
then began to appear in print as a brand new
(41:16):
unique letter W like we know the W in seventeen hundred.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Seventeen hundred Common Era AD. This is where we get
to also, of course, X, the letter SI of the
ancient Greeks. The lowercase version was seen in handwritten manuscripts
during medieval times. Not the restaurant my favorite checked it
(41:41):
all right, I just know it from the cable guy.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
It's fun.
Speaker 1 (41:44):
We should we should take absolutely it'll be ironically fun.
And there's a bunch of printers in the late fourteen hundreds,
guys in Italy. They're using lowercase x's, And now I
would argue it is an integral part of every SoundCloud
rapper's MC name.
Speaker 2 (42:04):
Not to mention, man, you pronounced that SI version with
the silent k on paper, it's KSI, and I kind
of wonder speaking of SoundCloud rapper types. I don't know
if you're familiar with this somewhat problematic YouTuber named KSI,
whose buddies with Jake Paul and all those rabbele rousers.
A bunch of bunch of kind of heels they are.
(42:26):
But he recently became the subject of some serious Internet
roasting with his new SoundCloud rapper esque song called in
the Thick of It, where he says something to the
effect of from the screen to the ring to the
pen to the king, something something something something that my bling.
You know, it's really really embarrassing. It sounds like a
backyard against theme song. So I hope that guy's doing okay.
(42:47):
He got pretty roasted and he just did the thing
you're not supposed to do where he just kept answering
the roasts and doubling down and then calling those people
big ol' meanies, and that they just didn't understand his genius.
So are the songs good?
Speaker 1 (42:59):
No?
Speaker 2 (42:59):
No, ks I, I hope you're okay. Here's to the
here's to the next song.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
But you know, there's always an opportunity, right, Everything has
a future, especially the letter why we mentioned this, you're right,
started out as upsilon or upsilon. It was added by
the Romans one ce. Now we got to go to
z Phoenicians back in the day again, as you can tell,
(43:29):
ridiculous historians, they were a big deal.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
They had a letter.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
Called Zion and it meant acts z A Y I N.
We would spell it phonetically now phoenicianally now uh. It
first looked like the letter I, and it just had
some fancy flourishes, some seraphs at the top and bottom,
little daily bops. The Greeks adopted it as zeta and
(43:53):
they gave it the sound yeah zip yeah, and it
was it used for several centuries until the Normans invaded
what we call the United Kingdom today and they said, hey,
we have a language that needs the sound of the
(44:14):
letter or needs the sound, and that's how we got Z.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
Yeah exactly, and that's how we wrap up this discussion
of the English alphabet. Man I kind of teased that, Ben,
so I don't want to leave the folks at home
without a dope beat to steps up too. We just
talked about a little bit briefly just how so many
of these things were derived initially from kind of emoji
like symbols and then kind of came to be repurposed
(44:40):
as phonetic sounds. We have whole cultures that use symbols
to represent concepts, and Ben, you pointed out in your
incredible outline here, and I completely agree that it feels
as though we might be heading towards the future where
the written word is kind of continuing to be dumbed
down and may well be going the way of the
(45:00):
dinosaurs in favor of emojis, which honestly, there's a benefit
there because they are universally understandable and there is dictated,
I guess by the powers that be at Apple, sort
of an emoji alphabet. They decide which ones go in,
which ones don't, and which new ones get added. And
I've always wonder what the politics of that is. It's
got to be fascinating.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
Yeah, many variables evolved. Now, First, good news for every
writer and ardent reader in the crowd. The written word
never goes away. It may evolve over time, however, the
horse has left the barn. As far as human communication goes,
Emoji are simple drawings pictures of anything you might imagine,
(45:45):
often used in place of words written in different alphabets
to convey ideas. Visually, everything we said about writing holds
true for emojis. Again, name check to or shout out
to Episode one. Entire novels have been written in emoji
as we speak, So it is not impossible to imagine
(46:07):
a world wherein these symbols become their own kind of language.
And the beautiful thing about this, the beautiful thing about
the human experiment, is that this could unify people, right,
could reduce friction and conversation. Someone who is a native
Mandarin speaker or someone who is speaking Cantonese, they can
(46:29):
interact with someone who speaks English just through emojis. Now,
they're gonna miss a lot of nuance.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
Sure, it's what I mean.
Speaker 5 (46:38):
We're not really living in a time of great nuance,
though I would argue you unfortunately things are a little
bit more of a blunt instrument in terms of language,
you know, for better or for worse, though, it is
another evolution and whether you're on board with it or not,
it is something that's fascinating to track.
Speaker 1 (46:55):
And with this we thank you, fellow Ridiculous Historian, so
much as always for tuning in. We're at the end
of the calendar year, as the humans call it. Shout
out to our super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Max the Phoenician Williams. That's his gangster name. Huge thanks
to you is Chris Fraciota's names Jeff Coates here in spirits.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Alex Williams, who composed this bang and track our fellow
rude dudes over at Ridiculous Crime. Check out their show.
If you like us, you'll love them.
Speaker 2 (47:26):
Indeed, did we say Alex Williams to compose our theme?
We did? Okay, Well, that's so she's so rad We
said it twice. That isn't rhyme, but that's okay. Thanks
to you, Ben for putting together this incredible two parter
on the history of the English language. That's no small feat.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
And you did it with Flair, Hey Noel, and also
with you, I owe you and sometimes why I saved
that joke for way too long.
Speaker 2 (47:50):
I think we made it at the very top. I
said we owe each other in fact, get it. Yeah,
I'm doing a vowel joke. Aha. I see, We'll circle.
I love it. We'll see you next time, folks. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(48:10):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Ridiculous History News
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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