Alphabet
by Jeff
Image text: Do I get to remove letters entirely? Or just rearrange them? Because the 'k/c' situation is ridiculous. Look, we can make out whenever. This is *immortality*!
This comic is a joke on the traditional pick-up line that goes something like this: "Baby, if I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put 'u' and 'I' together." Terrible I know.
However, in typical XKCD fashion, rather than continue with that tired pickup line, Cueball jumps at his change to rearrange the alphabet and fix the English Orthography (An orthography is a standardized system for using a particular writing system (script) to write a particular language. It includes rules of spelling, and may also concern other elements of the written language such as punctuation and capitalization.)
The joke there in is that hooking up with this girl can wait because this is a chance in a lifetime to rearrange the alphabet and change the English language.
June 15th, 2012
Well-stated explanation.
I’m sure plenty of us have lots of ideas, too, even conflicting ideas. Instead of “giving the users everything they want”, we would need a Steve Jobs of English Orthgraphy to say “Here’s what you get; enjoy!” And we would, immensely.
June 15th, 2012
I guess, I still don’t get it. I mean, I get that he’s using irony and Cueball’s solipsism to turn a tired line on its head, but the float-over text (the whole ‘k/c’ thing) I don’t get, and it’s the part I usually understand. Bah!
June 15th, 2012
Nm, just thought about it. Makes sense now. I had a steroid shot yesterday, and didn’t get any sleep last night b/c of it. Not exactly firing on all cylinders, here.
June 15th, 2012
I don’t understand the k/c joke either. By any chance, is there a link with a hidden sense of xkcd ?
June 15th, 2012
boB, below us, explained it rather well. Just saying that ‘k’ and ‘c’ sound alike sometimes, but not all the time, I guess.
June 19th, 2012
Yes, but for me, the joke was that “k/c” is not too far from “kiss”, and then there is a pun with “make out”.
Sorry if it was obvious to everybody, but this had to be told. After all, this is explainxkcd.com, where jokes come to be dissected.
June 15th, 2012
Yes! Finally, someone is addressing the ‘C’ situation. ‘C’ doesn’t have it’s own sound, it either pretends to be an ‘S’ or it pretends to be a ‘K’, or it colludes with other normally silent letters to be a sound it can’t be by itself (’CH’). Maybe ‘C’ should just be abolished, and ‘CH’ replaced with a new single letter. Maybe ‘CH’ could be replaced with a new letter that looks like a ‘C’.
Hmm. Would xkcd then be “ex kay cha dee”?
June 15th, 2012
FYI the ‘Y’ in Ye Olde Shoppe, is actually pronounce ‘th’. The use of the letter ‘Y” was a printer’s solution to replace the Old-English thorn þ. No relevance to current discussion, I just found it interesting.
June 15th, 2012
Are we singing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” incorrectly then?
June 16th, 2012
Ye also meant “you”. So we’re okay there.
June 18th, 2012
No – it’s {in modern, modern English} “Come all (of) you (who are) faithful”, not “Come all (of the people who could be counted among) the faithful”, as is obvious in the original (”Adeste Fideles”).
June 19th, 2012
I was just about to type a long post explaining how the nominative and vocative cases of Latin are almost always identical, but then I realised I misunderstood you. For a second I thought you said that “Come all of the people who are faithful” was indicated in the Latin, but you were actually saying the first sentence “come all of you who are faithful” was evident in the Latin. And I agree.
June 15th, 2012
Various eastern European countries actually have č and/or ć, which is meant to be pronounced as CH. They still retain c though.
June 15th, 2012
But in most Slavic languages that use Roman characters, “c” is pronounced /ts/. So there is no confusion of the type that English possesses.
June 15th, 2012
welcome to Italian (as long as the C is followed by an e or an i).
June 19th, 2012
Actually, it’s only a problem in English, a language which through some turn of history came to mix the latin letter c and the Greek letter kappa for its orthography. In most Roman languages , ‘c’ and ’s’ are distinct, and ‘k’ is almost never used, except in (mostly) words from Greek (kilogram) or English (kilt) origins.
Though in French there is a similar problem between ‘c’ and ‘q/qu’ (and also between ‘c’ and ’s’; ’s’ and ‘z’; etc.). See for example the word ‘coq’ (”cock, rooster”). Also, the letter ‘q’ is pronounced exactly the same as the word which means “ass”. So it is an endless source of jokes on the same level as the ones relating to the planet Uranus.
To conclude, I find it topical to remind everyone of the pun about assuming: “to assume makes an ass of you and I.”
June 15th, 2012
Wonder if he chose “heartbeat” as an example of how the same letters, in this case “ea” have different sounds in English.
Years ago I read we should be able to spell “fish” as “ghoti”. Just use the “gh” sound from “enough”, the “o” sound from “women”, and the “ti” sound from any “…tion” word.
Seriously, I don’t think I could learn English if it wasn’t my first (and only) language.
June 15th, 2012
English: the Perl of natural languages.
June 15th, 2012
In fact, English is otherwise quite easy language to learn and use (I can tell
), and I think this is why there has never been a successfully huge reason for an orthographic reform, as happened in many other, more complex languages (eg. German, Czech, Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese)
June 15th, 2012
Every language has their quirks. Yes, English is full of “spessial kases” making it really hard to learn how to spell things, and Spanish tends to be quite uniform making it a piesse of kake to spell. But in Spanish, along with a bunch of other languages, you have to learn the gender of every noun. There isn’t a single word for “the”, there’s a “maskuline the” and a “feminine the” and you have to know, for example, that pensil and sirkus and kar and kake, are male, whereas pen and church and kard and turtle (yes, even male turtles) are female. Why? Who knows why!
Insidentally, this entry has been kleansed for your konveniense of the letter see, exept in the kase of ch where there’s know proper substitute
June 15th, 2012
Oops, that should be *no proper substitute.
June 15th, 2012
Technically, you should have “cleansed” the silent “K” out of that, too.
June 15th, 2012
You cnow, you’re right!
June 15th, 2012
bunch …. bunsh after your kleaning?
What about x … why not split it up, make it ks.
June 18th, 2012
No, CH has a harsher sound than SH. Maybe TSH? buntsh? We’ll have to keep working at this. And study Mark Twains exsellent example someone posted a link to elsewhere on this page.
June 17th, 2012
Calvin and Hobbes mentioned that. “Is desk masculine? Is chair feminine? Kids in other countries know, but we don’t. I demand sex education!”
…
“I wonder if her (the teacher’s) doctor knows she takes that much medication.”
June 15th, 2012
Also, English evolved from Germanic roots (when the Jutes came over from the Denmark area and settled the island inhabited by the Druids), and there was a large French/Romance influence when the Normans invaded as well as the influence from the Roman Empire. Various other cultures and languages have shaped English, and American influences have caused further evolution still. A large shift occurred when flipping the “re” to “er” on words like “centre,” but certainly some homonym and grammar cleanup would help the language sufficiently. In terms of grammar and pronunciation, I find Spanish to be much more direct and logical than English, which has remnants of Germanic and French constructs that are often at odds with each other (hence, the many “special cases”).
June 18th, 2012
All you need to correctly use English is a decent sense of Etymology. Then everything falls into place. Knowing the correct etymology for a word will usually permit you to manoeuvre through the language without committing any faux pas.
June 16th, 2012
Swedish is a complex language? I find it about the easiest language I know and it’s not my first language
June 18th, 2012
I guess you’re from Finland. If so, no wonder, that you find other languages easy…
June 15th, 2012
In “heartbeat”, the second syllable obeys the traditional rule (”when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking”). The “a” in “beat” is silent because the “e” dominates it. However, in the first syllable, “a” dominates, because it is an “r-controlled vowel”. (http://www.phonicsontheweb.com/r-vowels.php)
“C” usually follows this rule: “ca” “co” and “cu” generally are pronounced with a hard “k” sound. In contrast, “ce” “ci” and “cy” are almost always the soft “s” sound. The “c” sound is distinct from “s” because “se” or “si” is sometimes pronounced with a “z” sound, as in, “nose” or “rise” or “rosier,” whereas “c” would never be pronounced as a “z”. Similarly, “kh” makes a glottal sound, much different from “ch,” which is somewhere between “t” and “sh”.
Spanish did have a separate letter, “ch,” but finally scrapped it in 2010, along with the letter “ll,” which produced a “yeh” sound. Another defeat for good phonetics, at the hands of the standard computer keyboard.
The substitution of “k” for “c” usually carries political connotations, see, e.g.,: “amerika” and “okupa”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satiric_misspelling#.22K.22_replacing_.22C.22)
I grew up learning “phonics,” which I understand has largely been superseded in US schools by “whole language awareness” but I think what children need really goes deeper than that. If we want children to really understand the mechanics of English orthography, we need to be teaching deep phonemic awareness. It can be done — I’ve seen it done, with severely dyslexic children: turning each word into a math puzzle.
In the 1980s, there was some fascinating experimentation going on, in which kindergarten teachers taught children _writing_ first, _then_ reading. The children learned to make letters by modelling them with clay, by forming the letter-shapes with their bodies… all sorts of ways. The children used what phonetic awareness they had to write stories (using their best estimate of how a word should be spelled) even before they could really read. (One of my first written words was “jrir” — for “dryer”.) I don’t think the technique really took off, but it’s a great idea.
June 18th, 2012
Wait, Spanish abolished “ch” and “ll” as letters? I used to enjoy saying the ABC’s with 29 letters! But they still exist, just not thought of as letters, right? I mean, ll is still a “yeh” sound.
June 15th, 2012
When quoting text as you do in almost every post, why don’t you indicate by quotation marks, let alone citing your source for the quote? It’s something that ought to be done–yes, even if you are quoting Wikipedia.
June 15th, 2012
It’s been getting weird lately since I’ve been awake late enough to see the new comic go up, and the first place I check for an explanation is Wikipedia. Then, when I wake up later in the morning and come here, well…
June 15th, 2012
He has been of late, doing just that. Don’t know why he didn’t tip the hat to Wikipedia this time.
June 15th, 2012
Here’s one of my favorite scenes from “I Love Lucy”, with Ricky trying to read a children’s book and running into hilarious problems with pronounciation:
http://bit.ly/KryPZm .
June 15th, 2012
I meant “pronunciation”. Can we have an editing feature for comments?
June 15th, 2012
This may have been posted here before, but here’s the poem that is the definitive statement on English spelling and pronunciation (and I still don’t know in what dialect Arkansas rhymes with four): http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php
June 15th, 2012
“The Chaos” should be recited in British “Received Pronunciation” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
June 18th, 2012
“Arkansas” rhymes with “four” here in Southern England (where terminal ‘r’ is often dropped), somewhat like Boston, MA, I believe.
June 18th, 2012
Well, its certainly not RP (i.e. the “correct” way).
June 15th, 2012
whew, thank you….
I wasn’t at all familiar with the “…put I and U together” line. And, without it this cartoon makes no sense whatsoever. (But, now after the explanation, it’s kinda funny.)
I guess this why we all love Jeff…
June 15th, 2012
Reforming the language, exactly the type of idea I had before I got even interested in girls. Not only eliminating redundant letters like “c”, but also introducing ones for sounds that cannot be spelled in a single letter, like English “sh”. And judging by what I stumble upon occasionally, I was not the only one.
Could be done. In Latin. Because it is not spoken any more. Trying to freeze the state of a living language is futile.
Side note: U and I are already side by side, at least on my QWERTZ keyboard, and QWERTY too. Maybe AZERTY as well?
June 16th, 2012
They’re together on Dvorak, too.
June 15th, 2012
Mark Twain on the topic of orthographical reform: http://www.plainlanguage.gov/examples/humor/marktwain.cfm
June 15th, 2012
This is freaking brilliant.
June 15th, 2012
To put it mildly…
June 15th, 2012
It’s like ‘Ol Ben was reading my mind.. and twisting it to itty bitty bits.
June 15th, 2012
Funny. But he’d eliminate “X”, and then continues to use it relentlessly.
June 15th, 2012
He didn’t use it again until he brought it back to replace “th”
June 15th, 2012
You’re right.
I rely yould reed beter.
June 15th, 2012
“maindz” (minds) and “riplais” (replace) have different sounds but take the same “ai” spelling in his text. This is odd since “rimeiniing” (remaining) was used, so you’d think he would have used the “ei” to make “ripleis”. Inconsistencies!
June 15th, 2012
“Baby, if I could rearrange the alphabet, I’d put ‘w’ and ‘I’ together.”
June 15th, 2012
Although this can only be said to twins.
June 15th, 2012
I was very surprised about this comic, since I seldom come across a native English speaker who criticises his/her own language. I thought the comic was very funny and the explanation provided here allowed me to understand it even better.
My first language is Spanish and from that point of view I agree that English orthography should be radically improved. I cannot imagine the ordeal that children must go through to learn it, on the other hand I have very fond memories of my classmates and myself learning how read and write in Spanish, it was just like a game and everything made sense. It was very rewarding, because by investing just very little time in learning the pronunciation for each letter and the rules that make up for the non-phonetic part of the language we were very quickly able to read every single word in the language with 100 percent accuracy. Another advantage is that when speaking in Spanish it’s very uncommon to need someone to spell something out for you, like the name of a person or street.
The main problem could be that since English speaking countries have varying pronunciations, it may not be possible to come up with a standard spelling. For example, just think of the way the Americans and the English pronounce the word “Closer” or any other that ends in “er” or “re”. And there are many other examples, many of them involving the variations with pronounced vowels, which are more than just the five found in the alphabet.
Anyway, as a user of the English language I’d be glad to see some positive change.
June 15th, 2012
Spanish has “j” and “g” which can sometimes share a sound. I’m not sure how to address the “ll” since it seems like a vowel in usage. If “h” is always silent, why is it used at all? I do realize that the alphabet does change, so I’m addressing all of the letters I’ve seen in it since I’m not sure what the current one is. “ñ” seems like it takes on a “y” sound after which seems like there could just be a vowel after a “n” instead, eliminating the need for two letters that look alike. You guys also have the “c/s” problem, as can be seen in “cinco”.
This is all based on a semester of Spanish, so my accuracy may not be at its finest.
June 16th, 2012
You are mostly well informed. Nice comment. I’ll explain what you mentioned.
1) “J” and “G” do share a sound, but there’s a rule involved, which always holds and prevents anyone from reading them wrong. Although people could still spell it wrong. (Spanish makes it impossible for people to read its words the wrong way, but sadly it does not prevent misspelled words, since sometimes one word could be spelled in a variety of ways, but only one is right).
2) “LL” is supposed to be a really hard “LY” sound, but it’s pronunciation varies according to the region where it is spoken.
3) Yes, H is always silent when not in combination with “C”, and I think it also remained by itself due to historical reasons. At the very least, it is ALWAYS silent (when not in combination with “C”). It is only useful as “CH” and carries the sound found in the word “CHeese”.
4) “Ñ” is a really hard “NY” sound and it is absolutely necessary. And this can be proven with the comparison of the real word “teñir” and the made up word “tenir” (you’d have to really know Spanish in order to understand that, sorry). Perhaps this letter could be replaced by the “NH” combination or a “NY” combination, although it would be unnecessary to lose it and we’d be losing identity in the process.
5) About “C” and “S” the explanation could turn a tad tedious, since there are two main branches “Spain Spanish” and “Latin American Spanish”. In “Spain Spanish” (at least for most of Spain) “C” and “S” do not share any sounds at all, but in “Latin American Spanish” they do, “S” is always pronounced as “S” in “Silver” and “C” can be pronounced as “S” or “K” (”K” as in “Kilo”), but once again the rules save the day and nobody could pronounce them wrong, although spelling mistakes could be made.
In short, Spanish makes sure the reader will make no mistakes when reading, but does allow the writer to make spelling mistakes sometimes. The advantage is that it makes much more sense than English orthography, even if it isn’t a perfect system.
Spanish speakers only really need to work at remembering the right spelling for the few words they could misspell (many are impossible to misspell), and also knowing the rules to place accents on words.
I hope that was useful.
June 18th, 2012
I think the best example of the need for “ñ” is the difference between “año” and “ano”.
June 19th, 2012
It still sounds like a “y” is placed after to my American ears, which (according to that logic) puts it in the same territory as splitting “x” into “ks”.
June 19th, 2012
Actually, the Spanish ‘ll’ (classical verison) and ‘ñ’ are palatal consonants (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_consonant), which gives them a typical “wet” sound, akin to what can be heard in the English ‘ing’ verb ending. The Wikipedia article contrasts uñón /uɲon/ “large nail” (of the finger or toe) vs. unión /unjon/ “union”.
Hope this helps.
June 16th, 2012
“Anyway, as a user of the English language I’d be glad to see some positive change.”
As long as we are relatively young, we can subscribe to that. With age, alas, that often changes. Which reminds me of something a teacher of mine told me back in 2000 or so:
At this time, there was an ongoing process to reform German orthography. Federalism caused trouble here: in the northernmost state, where I lived, people inquired a poll on the subject, and it resulted with a majority rejecting the new orthography, while the other 15 states did not challenge it.
Said teacher told me that at the poll, an elderly lady had asked how she should vote. He had asked her back what outcome she wanted to vote for. Her reply: “Everything should remain the way it is.”
June 16th, 2012
Also, there is no ‘u’ in ‘a heartbeat’.
June 16th, 2012
I am sure there’s something with *immortality* that we don’t get.
June 16th, 2012
I was expecting someone to say something about that. It intrigued me as well, and at first I had no clue. Now, I have an idea of what it might mean:
All human beings are mortal, we all know that. Throughout history many have tried to become immortalised through their deeds, by doing great things, things that would be remembered long after they were gone. If I am correct, Randall was referring to modifying the English orthography and therefore becoming famous for it for eternity. So even if he won’t be around forever, he’ll be remembered as the one who brought order to chaos, light to the darkness, or something like that.
This idea came to me thanks to a scene from the movie “Troy”, when Brad Pitt’s character “Achilles” says to his men that they should fight that war and by doing so their names would be forever remembered.
“Immortality, take it! It’s yours!”
June 18th, 2012
Actually it is Ovidius who first wrote about making himself immortal. After being exiled for corruption he took up writing as a way to redeem himself. Of course he wrote brilliant books such as “how to seduce someone” and “how to dump someone” (liberal translation of title, “the art of making love” doesn’t nearly catch the content). He is only serious author to ever use the most taboo word “landica” (clitoris) even though he had to split it. Ye he sure became immortal.
June 19th, 2012
One reason English has escaped orthographic reform is that nobody wants to mess with the works of Shakespeare. (There has actually been orthographic reform in English, just not after Shakespeare.)
In Shakespeare’s time, poets tended to spend a large part of their poems boasting about how fantastically immortal their poetry was, regardless of subject.
The last lines of “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” are
“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
(Where “this” refers to the poem itself.)
June 16th, 2012
If I could rearrange the alphabet, I’d replace “c” with “g,” so the “change” in the second line of Jeff’s third paragraph would be correct! This will break lots of other things, you say? Oh well, that’s the next reformer’s problem…
June 18th, 2012
If I could rearrange the alphabet, I’d make the initial letters of OCD be in alphabetical order like they ought to be.
June 19th, 2012
English (at least, American English) definitely has some unnecessary consonants – C (although we do need a CH), Q, and X. Possibly W and Y, although those aren’t completely consonants (Wikipedia: they are “semivowels”). Other languages have consonants that we don’t, such as a “zh”, “sh”, and “th” – but we do have a way of expressing those sounds without the single letters (I just did! – although zh is rarely, if ever, spelled that way in non-loan English words – usually the sound is from a combination of letters like in “measure”.) There is a different sound for the Arabic letter commonly transliterated as Q (but sometimes as K or Kh, sometimes as G, although I prefer Q because it is distinct – c.f. former Libyan leader Qaddafi / Gadaffi / Khaddafi etc. – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muammar_Gaddafi#Transliteration_of_his_Arabic_name ) – it’s like a K but said more in the back of the mouth.
In looking at various European alphabets on Wikipedia, I find that I like the Icelandic alphabet better than ours:
The English alphabet has, in my mind at least, 26 letters, consisting of 18 definite consonants (BCDFGJKLMNPQRSTVXZ), 2 half-consonant-half-vowels (WY), five definite vowels (AEIOU), and one heavy breathing sound (H) which doesn’t really fit any other category.
The Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, officially all consonants, although three are more-or-less vowels: A, W(or O), Y(or E). (There are a couple of other vowelish letters, such as “aleph maksura” and “tamar buta”, but those aren’t official letters.) Anyway, in our alphabetic order, the letters are A, B, D, harder D, F, Gh, H, other H, J, K, Kh, L, M, N, Q, R, S, other S, SH, T, harder T, TH (like thin), harder TH (like then), a third TH (rare, and which sounds when some people say it like a second Z), W, Y, Z, and an extra one (”ayin”) which I think sounds like a vowel, but according to wikipedia is a “Voiced pharyngeal fricative” which has no English equivalent. Oh, also, the one I called “Gh” can sound that way when some native speakers say it, but when others say it, it sounds more like you’re clearing your throat. (You can probably see why I flunked Arabic class.) Anyway, although there are subtle differences in pronunciation, I don’t think many of the “extra” consonants in Arabic are completely necessary – and they’re usually very rare in Arabic words anyway. The Persian alphabet is an improvement on the Arabic alphabet – in addition to the letters above, there are four extra consonants: CH, G, P, and ZH. (When those letters aren’t available, Arabic has to do without – for example, police cars are labeled “BOLES”, using the “long vowels” O and E that can also be W and Y, respectively.)
The Greek alphabet is derived from Semitic alphabets similar to Hebrew and Arabic, but has fewer letters than ours: 24 letters consisting of 17 consonants (B CH D F G K L M N P PS R S T TH X Z) and 7 vowels (A E E I O O U). This might be a good model for a revised English alphabet – and we could even take out the PS and the X. (ξ and Ψ are two of the three rarest letters in Greek anyway – from http://www.sttmedia.com/characterfrequency-greek )
The Icelandic alphabet seems like another improvement on ours: 32 letters: 17 consonants (BDFGJKLMNPRSTVX and two TH’s), one H, and a whopping 14 vowels, which, without getting into their actual pronunciations, look like two each of AEIUY, 3 O’s, and AE (like in “encyclopædia”!) So, missing from our alphabet are Q, W, and Z, which wouldn’t be so bad if they left, would they?
So, I think if I were designing an English alphabet from scratch, looking at these other alphabets, I would have the following letters:
18 consonants (B D Ch F G J K L M N P R S Sh T Th V Z)
5-10 vowels (depending on whether or not we counted “long vowels” and “short vowels” separately, like Icelandic seems to, and like Greek does for O)
Possibly an H (not necessary, or if it is included, we don’t REALLY need the SH and TH above as we have another way of representing them)
Definitely no C, Q, W, or Y.
Finally, I have to end with this link, the “Decibet” from SNL:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/75/75rdecabet.phtml