The Alphabet Explained: The Origin of Every Letter

Think back, if you will, to the cli­mac­tic scenes of Indi­ana Jones and the Last Cru­sade, which take place in the hid­den tem­ple that con­tains the Holy Grail. His father hav­ing been shot by the das­tard­ly Nazi-sym­pa­thiz­ing immor­tal­i­ty-seek­er Wal­ter Dono­van, Indy has no choice but to retrieve the leg­endary cup to make use of its reput­ed heal­ing pow­ers. This entails pass­ing through three dead­ly cham­bers, one of which has a floor cov­ered in stones, each one labeled with a let­ter of the alpha­bet. The way through, accord­ing to Jones père’s research, is the name of God. But when Indy steps on “J” for Jeho­vah, it crum­bles away, and he near­ly plunges into the enor­mous pit below.

Of course, true fans will have already quot­ed the rel­e­vant line: “But in the Latin alpha­bet, Jeho­va begins with an I!” Those of us who first watched the movie as kids — and, for that mat­ter, many of us who first watched it as adults — sim­ply took that fact as giv­en. But if we watch the Rob­Words video above, we can learn how and when that “I” became a “J”.

To the ancient Romans, explains host Rob Watts, these let­ters were one and the same, serv­ing both vow­el and con­so­nant duty depend­ing on the con­text (as in “Iulius” Cae­sar). Both of them date back to a “rather more com­pli­cat­ed char­ac­ter” that looks like a bad­ly con­tort­ed F, and which orig­i­nat­ed as a pic­togram rep­re­sent­ing a human hand and fore­arm.

The let­ter J only emerged lat­er, “when scribes want­ed to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between these two usages.” (As we’ve seen, it also offered the descen­dants of the Knights Tem­plar a way to trick inter­lop­ers in their cav­erns.) Through­out the course of the video, Watts cov­ers this and oth­er curi­ous steps in the evo­lu­tion of the alpha­bet we use to write Eng­lish and many oth­er lan­guages today. These pro­duced such fea­tures as the plur­al of knife and wolf being knives and wolves, the seem­ing super­fluity of Q, and — for an Eng­lish­man like Watts, an unig­nor­able sub­ject — the transat­lantic “zed”/“zee” divid­ing line. Exam­ined close­ly, the forms of our let­ters tells a mil­len­nia-span­ning sto­ry whose cast includes Egyp­tians, Phoeni­cians, Canaan­ites, Etr­uscans, Greeks, Romans, and oth­ers besides. And as the expe­ri­ence of Indi­ana Jones illus­trates, you nev­er know when you’ll need its lessons.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Evo­lu­tion of the Alpha­bet: A Col­or­ful Flow­chart, Cov­er­ing 3,800 Years, Takes You From Ancient Egypt to Today

How Writ­ing Has Spread Across the World, from 3000 BC to This Year: An Ani­mat­ed Map

The Writ­ing Sys­tems of the World Explained, from the Latin Alpha­bet to the Abugi­das of India

How to Write in Cuneiform, the Old­est Writ­ing Sys­tem in the World: A Short, Charm­ing Intro­duc­tion

The Old­est Known Sen­tence Writ­ten in an Alpha­bet Has Been Found on a Head-Lice Comb (Cir­ca 1700 BC)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.