26 Stories to Tell

Perhaps it is fitting that the English language should use the Roman alphabet. English has passed through so many evolutions, with so many influences and borrowings, and its words have changed so much in meaning over time, it might as well use a borrowed alphabet that has just as checkered a history, and use it in an irregular and abnormal fashion. A language that can have two words, “cleave” and “cleave,” spelled and sounding the same but meaning “adhere” and “divide,” can handle using a letter—C—to represent two quite different sounds, [k] and [s]. A language that can have dozens of synonyms for some words but does not have an easy future or past tense for “can” (“will be able to”? yuck) probably should have at least three letters to represent the sound [k] but still needs to combine letters to represent other basic sounds such as those heard in “sheathe” (the closing sound of which English used to have a perfectly good single letter for, but which we discarded for the sake...