SPASMS is pleased to present another edition of Amy Explains the Alphabet…

This is complicated, because to tell you about the tenth letter of the modern English alphabet, I have to give you the entire history of the ninth, with a little bit of twenty-five for good measure, because until a few hundred years ago, they were the same letter (making spelling bees a mite tricky).

See, one morning about two thousand years ago last Wednesday, this Phoenician and this Palestinian were drinking and bullshitting. And it occurred to the Palestinian that of all the graphic representations of speech sounds the Phoenicians had created, they still hadn’t come up with one for the semi-consonant sound ỳ. (You can just imagine the ribbing he gave the Phoenician over that one.)

Anyway, the Phoenician, being something of a wiseass, says, “sure I’ve got an icon for that. I’d write it for you on a napkin, but napkins haven’t been invented yet. Maybe next time.”

So the Palestinian whips out a piece of cloth, folds it over twice and invents the napkin. Pushing it across the table to his friend, he says, “Show me the letter.”

Well, of course the Phoenician stalls and claims he can’t write out the letter on the napkin since the ballpoint pen hasn’t been invented yet (they used this type of excuse a lot back then), so the Palestinian’s like, “I don’t believe you ever came up with this letter. You’re such a freaking idiot, man, I don’t know why I even hang out with you anymore. Get a life!” So the Phoenician suddenly whips out a paintbrush and scribbles something that looks like a backwards eighth-note. “Happy?”

The Palestinian takes one look and says, “You just made it up, didn’t you?”

“No,” lies the Phoenician.

“Did too.”

“Did not.”

“Okay, then, what’s it called?”

“Um… ‘yodh.’” Which the Palestinian doesn’t believe for even a second, because it’s the Phoenician word for “hand.”

Not long after this, the Palestinian gave the Phoenician a wedgie for being so lame, but the symbol stuck, at least long enough for the Greeks to steal the idea and (as usual) change it into something completely different. They played around with cool lightning-bolt-looking graphs before turning the letter into a single line and re-christening it “iota,” which makes more sense than “hand.” The Greeks were also smart enough to give it a new sound, ī. Everybody thought this was a great idea, so they kept it up till late medieval times, when the dot above the lowercase was added so it wouldn’t be mistaken for lowercase L.

But…! The Romans used I for both ī and ỳ (cheap bastards). So eventually they had to differentiate between the two sounds (otherwise we’d still be calling a certain gentleman “Iesus”) and just before the Roman Empire expired, they added a little tail for the ỳ sound. By the end of the 17th century, the ỳ was more of a ĵ.

You’ll find J in jump, jiminy, jazz and jai-alai, which I find extremely amusing. Jubilant, even.

Copyright 2005 Amy Frushour Kelly. All rights reserved.
Reproduction by any means prohibited without prior written consent.