New Books in Popular Culture Danny Bate, "Why Q Needs U: A History of Our Letters and How We Use Them" (Bonnier Books, 2025)
Mar 21, 2026
Danny Bate, a linguist and writer who studies historical languages, takes listeners on a playful tour of the alphabet. He shares quirky origin stories, why letters changed shape and order, and how quirks like Q plus U, silent E, and soft versus hard C and G came to be. Short, surprising histories and linguistic tales make everyday letters feel new and mysterious.
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Why We Write Left To Right
- Writing direction changed historically; Phoenicians wrote right-to-left but Greeks flipped to left-to-right when adding vowels.
- The flip suited Greek's new vowel representation and led to most descendant scripts, including English, writing left-to-right.
How The Soft C Developed
- Soft vs hard C arose from context-dependent sound changes after Latin, not a Roman invention.
- Latin C was /k/; front vowels conditioned shifts producing /s/ or /t/ in daughter languages, creating the modern C split.
H Is The Alphabet's Workhorse
- H functions as a flexible modifier in European alphabets, teaming with letters (th, sh, ch) to spell sounds Latin lacked.
- Because post-classical Latin lost the /h/ sound, H was available to double letters rather than needing diacritics.
