love your alphabet ... where'd you get it?

Hello!

I've been thinking a lot about alphabets lately. Why? Well, to be honest I kind of always do – it's a word nerd thing. But my degree of interest has definitely risen above its usual baseline level this year. Not 100% sure what prompted this, but I think it started when I took a beginner's course in Japanese.

As I'm sure many of you know, Japanese is a very alphabetically intense language. It has two 46-character syllabaries*, used in conjunction with several thousand imported Chinese characters, and elements of both systems frequently appear side-by-side in the same words. So in the first half of 2011, I spent quite a lot of time practising and memorising endless combinations of strokes and flourishes.

The other reason, I guess, is that I've spent pretty much the whole year in what I not-very-imaginatively call 'Cyrillic World' – i.e. that part of the world in which varieties of the Cyrillic alphabet are used to represent the sounds of local languages.

There are quite a few versions of Cyrillic, because the languages it's used for differ in their sound inventories, so of course characters have to be invented or adapted to accommodate this. And recently, I was a little surprised to realise that I've actually developed distinct preferences for some Cyrillic alphabets over others.

This struck me as being quite odd. I mean, why should I prefer one set of abstract symbols to another? Why should anyone?

This thought set me off on a daisy chain of other aimless musings, some of which (being a part-time sadist) I'm going to share with you now.

See, I figure that if someone asks you "What are your favourite kinds of music?", there's an obvious and reasonable basis for their question. Music is clearly something that we engage with on an emotional level. (In fact, earlier this year I heard the following words in a Ted** talk: "Mathematics is the language of science, and music is the language of human emotions". Don't know how the rest of you feel, but personally I think that sums it up rather nicely.) So having a preference for certain kinds of music simply implies that some forms of emotional expression 'speak to you' more than others ... which makes perfect sense, given that we're all different and ya-ya-ya, the usual palaver.

But what about this question: "What's your favourite boys' name?"

I think that, in answering a question about name preferences, there are a number of considerations which different people draw on to varying extents. You might answer partly based on positive associations you have with people you know who go by certain names. Or you may be attracted to the meaning of the name. That's all perfectly fine and rational. But then there are somewhat more abstract considerations, like the sound of the name. And I know that spelling is a factor too, if you're one of those people who like names with, say, the letter "x" in them. (Personally I like almost any name with "ж" in it, which roughly equates to "zh" in Roman letters. Both the sound and the look appeal to me.) So here we're moving away from something that has an obvious connection to human emotions, and towards something that's a bit less readily explicable.

How about this one: "What's your favourite English word?" Do you have one? If so, why? Is it really possible to react emotionally with a mere word?

Of course, I'm sure that a comfortable majority of the people who visit me here at The Manor would answer with an emphatic "yes!". And so would I – no hesitation at all.

Recently at a teachers' meeting, a colleague asked me to come up to the board and write one of my favourite English words, as a lead-in to a rather nifty language game he was presenting. So many contenders flashed through my mind that I found it difficult to isolate one. Those few seconds were like a nostalgic little head trip, during which I recalled the pleasure I've derived from using or hearing dozens of different words. And playing them off against each other was extremely difficult, because the pleasures associated with each are so distinct.

(In case you're wondering, I ended up going with palaver, which I semi-deliberately used above. But then I instantly regretted it, and wished I'd chosen purr or weirdarse or paraphernalia or any of a hundred others instead.)

So yeah ... I'm definitely with the 'favourite words' people.

At the same time, this weirds me out a little, because I really have no idea why I should care about words at all. They're just conventions, used for practical purposes like referring to objects, explaining what we want, saying where things are in relation to one another and so on. Take away all those referent objects and wishes and whatnot, and the words we use to describe them have absolutely no business being in the universe at all. And when we try to use words for more profound things, like communicating our emotional states to other people, they often fail us – sometimes because of our limited ability to use them well, but other times because of limitations inherent in the actual words themselves.

Perhaps more damningly, if you exclude the relatively rare phenomenon of onomatopoeia, the form of all the words we use is utterly without significance. I mean, the sounds "c-a-t" have no more relation to a cuddly four-legged animal that can purr and be house-trained than the sounds "n-e-k-o" (which is "cat" in Japanese) or "k-o-sh-k-a" (a female cat in Russian). It's only because humans implicitly agree on the meanings of these little sound streams that they can signify anything at all; take away our willingness to make millions of these semantic contracts with each other, and a neko could signify "the person who carried me around in her uterus for nine months" to you, and "a small sausage-shaped object which I found in my garden last week" to your neighbour. Far more likely, though, it would mean precisely nothing to either of you.

So yeah, you get the idea ... words are essentially hollow, empty vessels, free of inherent content. And explaining why we feel more affection for some of these vessels than others generally involves just looking at, say, an adjective, and remarking that we really like the cut of its jib ... which strikes me as pretty lame.

Ok, time to move a bit closer to my actual point. If all of this applies to words – the weapon of choice for everyone from Chaucer to Chekov, from Obama to Murakami – then it surely applies even more to alphabets. A bunch of strokes on a page, used for the fairly mechanical task of composing words, which we've already established are meaningless: how can anyone possibly feel for these things?

And yet, I do.

As a consequence of all these musings, I'm now wondering this: am I alone here, or are there other people who also experience some kind of reaction to written characters? I don't know the answer. I hope it's a yes, though, because I'm about to ramble on this topic in much greater detail.

In fact, bearing in mind everything I've said above, I've decided to present you with a little collection of writing systems which, for one reason or another, I love or admire.

*several seconds of nonplussed silence*

I knew you'd be pleased )))

It's gonna be in at least two parts, because it's a subject that's oddly close to my heart, and I have a lot to say about it. Before I do, though, would anyone else care to

a) say what your favourite alphabet(s) are, and why; or
b) hazard a guess as to which ones I'm gonna throw onto my list of favourites?

I'd really like to hear from you about this, especially on the first point. So if you've been dying to get some dirty confession like "I just adore Hebrew script!" off your chest, now's your chance. Neither myself or anyone else here will judge you, I promise.

Waiting ...

 
* A syllabary is a system of writing in which every character represents one syllable. This is in contrast to the idea of an 'alphabet', in which each character represents one sound – at least in theory. (Anyone who has studied English, with its dog's breakfast of a spelling system, knows that this theory doesn't hold up very well in the real world!)  

** "Ted" = ted.com, a website which I mentioned in a recent entry. I won't plug it again; just wanted to clear up the reference.