The Twenty-Six
“There are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet.” Emily warmed her hands on the coffee mug I had just filled while our cat rubbed against her leg. “Not one letter more,” she insisted.
"What about ç in façade, ï in naïve, ê in crêpe, and é in cliché? I count at least twenty-nine letters. Did my first-grade teacher lie to make English seem easier? And then did all my other teachers perpetuate that deception, a grand conspiracy of educators?" I gazed into my coffee, my eyes losing focus as the cream transformed into the shapes of those morphologic abominations. “I don’t even know where to start with açaí.”
“Those aren’t English letters. They're borrowed from other languages, where they are diacritical marks to help with pronunciation. I'll show you.” Emily tapped her phone to summon an authoritative language website, but I gently rested my hand on hers and shook my head. This was a conversation about philosophy and the integrity of the English language, not an argument to be refereed by Google. She rested the phone screen side up on our kitchen table.
We exchanged smiles and continued our conversation in a civil manner.
“I have enough trouble finding the em dash on my keyboard,” I said. “These characters unnecessarily complicate writing. They’re like a friend who asks if he can stay at your house for a couple of days, but is still there months later.” I narrowed my eyes. “Look, this is how I feel: Either make these marks official English language letters and teach them from the get-go or ban them. The status quo is a linguistic twilight zone that doesn’t do anyone any good.”
“You were taught that plurals are formed by adding an s to words. Then along came mice. Somehow you survived, Bill.” She snapped a crisp carrot stick in half and took a bite. "You'll survive this, too."
I shook my head. “It’s as if these letters snuck into English, like spies crossing the border."
“Maître d’,” Emily offered.
I had forgotten about that horror.
“I don’t even know what purpose that job serves, other than somebody else you need to tip.”
"There's nothing you can do about these marks," Emily said.
"So, you're saying that these are simultaneously letters and not letters."
Emily folded her arms in front of her and harrumphed.
"I'm changing my name to Bĭll."
"You are not."
If we banned those marks in the English language, it could be a slippery slope to straight up banning letters. Do we really need “x”? Xiphoid can be Ziphoid, xenomorphic can be zenomorphic, xanthosis can be zanthosis. Just replace “x” with “z”. Unless it’s a word like x-ray, which can just be spelled “eks-ray”
Funny; a post about the English language that starts with a dangling modifier in the first paragraph. I thought it was deliberate at first!