Talking About Words: Exporting English

With Prof. Richard W. Bailey

Syllabaries are where it's @

'My cousin used to work for a dot com.' This sentence would have been unintelligible not very long ago, but now everyone knows what it means. That meaning of dot isn't in all the dictionaries yet, and there's some confusion about how to spell the words in which it appears.

Some journalists like dot-com, while others like dot.com, which may seem to some what the grammarians call pleonastic—more than you really need—since the dot comes twice, once as dot and the other as '.'
But in either case, there's no doubt that dot has entered English in a new way.

A group that keeps track of such things, the American Dialect Society, declared dot to be the most useful word of 1997.

Dot is all the more remarkable as a new word since it would have been easily possible to have called it point (as in 98.6º F) or period (as in "put a '.' at the end of the sentence").

E-mail addresses have given us not only various e-combinations (e-commerce, e-book) but also the use of @ 'at' from the division between the parts of the address (for instance, president@whitehouse.gov). Read aloud, that address comes out as "President at White House dot gov." No one reading this essay in the e-version of Michigan Today at umich.edu needs to be told that.

There are lots of these marks that we read as if they were words, and writing systems that make a habit of rendering symbols like @ or '.' as syllables are called syllabaries. We might well write "th@" for "that" or "pseu.uberculosis" for "pseudotuberculosis." The most famous of the syllabaries is the one (or really two) used to write Japanese; hiragana has 48 symbols, each representing a syllable.

The Cherokee syllabary, a writing system developed from scratch in the United States, is another famous example. It caught on immediately after its introduction in 1819, and virtually every adult Cherokee learned to read in it. All sorts of texts appeared, from Bibles to newspapers.

Thanks to dot-technology, there are several convenient sources of the characters one needs to write in Cherokee and other syllaberies. And plenty of people do. The Internet is a virtual neighborhood of language mavens. Esperanto hasn't been so healthy in decades. Moribund languages like Manx show a little flicker in the eyelid of what had been thought a corpse.

Alternative symbol systems aren't hard to find. In Utah, just before the Civil War, a follower of Brigham Young invented a 38-character system for English and called it the Deseret Alphabet. (Not a syllabary, it was intended to bring converts into the mystery of the faith. Though it didn't catch even at the time, you can download a complete set of Deseret fonts right now and learn to read the Î>klîq (English) written in it.)

Even alphabetic English has a handful of symbols that represent syllables. In addition to @ and '.', there are & 'and', * 'star', / 'slash', # 'number', + 'plus', -- 'dash'. Some of these have variant readings like * 'asterisk' and / 'virgule'.

Before the typewriter impoverished our writing system, English had lots of other characters, and the power of the computer—with a unicode for everything—promises a revival of those that have been lost.

We can expect to see façade spelled that way instead of facade; in fact, my word processor even puts in that cedilla all by itself. Because resume is ambiguous—it can be pronounced "re- zoom" when a verb and "rez -oo-may" when a noun—the spell checker doesn't take liberties with it. But it is no great trouble to clear away doubt by spelling the noun resumé or even résumé. And café pops out unbidden.

On the whole, things are better than they were. We can even get Thaïs and naïf, with the proper dieresis mark, back from the memory hole into which the typewriter flung them.

Our syllabic characters are right there to play with, as instant messaging has done with the names of letters like OIC 'oh, I see' or CU 'see you'.

It's not hard to ? that way:

√ing in her b€ 4 S $$, P@ had a ¥ 2 travel. She called her friend ? & said "—over and don't B L8." P@ opened the door and found herself in ?'s M{} and a 3 ^ ? on her finger. She began to C ** and nothing made any ¢.

Imagine the possibilities. ?

Richard W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, University of Michigan Press, 2003—a biography of an American thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from 1821 to 1871. It was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2003.