Danny Bate’s recent book Why Q needs U: a history of our letters and how we use them (2025) is an entertaining guide to the histories and shapes of the letters in the modern English alphabet. It contains 26 chapters (‘numbered’, unsurprisingly, A to Z), and an introduction and an epilogue.
Content
Each chapter address its titular letter and other topics too. The 1st 5 chapters cover (in addition to each chapter’s subject letter) an overall history of the alphabet, from Egyptian hieroglyphs, through the Phoenicians, Greeks, the Romans, Angels and Saxons (not forgetting the Jutes) and the Normans.
Among the many other topics covered are:
- the entangled history of F, U, V and W
- the split of Roman J into separate J and I
- the source of the dot above the vertical line in i
- the emergence of upper-case and lower-case versions of our modern English alphabet from 2 separate alphabets
- the origin of A as a letter representing a consonant (glottal stop) not recorded in English spelling (though still present in speech)
- why the pronunciation of C split into ‘soft’ (in cent) and ‘hard’ (in cap), with G similarly spitting into ‘soft’ (in gem) and ‘hard’ (in gamma). For similar splits in the Romance languages, please see https://languagemiscellany.com/2022/07/romance-languages-pronouncing-c-and-g/
- the near loss of K in Old English, and its subsequent revival
- digraphs, including CH, TH, SH, GH, NG, CK, DG and the role of E as part of split digraphs (‘magic E’) representing vowels that underwent the great English Vowel Shift.
- the names we use for the letters
- use of double letters
- the order of the alphabet, and changes in the order
- how French-trained scribes affected English spelling after the Norman Conquest in 1066, a subject I have covered before French scribes with good intentions – Language Miscellany
The introduction mentions Gerard Nolst Trenité’s poem The Chaos, which highlights some of the irregularities and inconsistencies of his English spelling. https://languagemiscellany.com/2021/10/the-chaos-of-english-spelling/
Conclusion
I enjoyed reading this book, which is written with a very light touch for a general audience. I would recommend it to anyone.
The author also runs an interesting blog at https://dannybate.com/
I received this book for my birthday, and found it very interesting, but it is criminal that it has no index.
I don’t know whether a book like this needs an index. It is more for enjoyment than for reference. Maybe it would be useful to have at least a list of the main topic of each chapter.