Why Q Needs U – Danny Bate

(Goodreads does not give an epub-not-purchased-through-Amazon option, so this review is labeled as referring to the Kindle edition.)

Not only was this book fun to read, but I kept retelling particularly-interesting bits to others. The book is organized into one chapter per letter. Each chapter has

• The ancient history of the letter, and the path through which it entered the ‘Latin’ alphabet.
• The more-modern history of the letter, and the path through which it entered English.
• Interesting tidbits pertaining to current usage - and how the usage came to be.
• Other linguistically-interesting information for which this seemed to be a good chapter.

Reasonably, the ‘other’ in the earlier chapters front-loads big-picture background, such as the path most letters took from Phoenician to Greek to Etruscan to Latin. Those chapters also introduce the largest hammer blows the English language and alphabet took - from the Norman invasion and the Great Vowel Shift.

Aside from twenty-six chapters of interesting and entertaining tidbits, I came away with two general takeaways:

• Alphabets evolve because the intelligent people using them modify them to solve real problems. E.g., the alphabet does not match (or no longer matches) spoken language.
• English spelling, specifically, has its reasons. The author notes that the problem isn’t that English spelling lacks rules - as many learners believe - but that it has too many rules, and we intuitively understand many of them. If someone used ‘lat’ as a word, we would have a pretty good idea how to pronounce ‘lat’, ‘lated’, ‘latted’.

There are twenty-seven chapters. In an epilogue, Bate invites the reader to imagine what English alphabet/spelling reform might look like - and to realize that most commonsense improvements would not be considered improvements in most locales. English spelling is going to consider to bear the sloppiness that comes with three millennia of evolution.