Free Alphabetical by Michael Rosen Page B

who know the trick – power over those who don’t. It is an alphabetic way of whispering behind someone’s back: they can hear or see that you’re talking but can’t make out what you’re saying.
    Ciphers reveal some important things about the alphabet. Making an alphabetic cipher (substituting one letter for another) drains the letter you are looking at from the purpose for which it was invented, which is to invite you to make a particular sound. The only things that matter in cipher-making, though, are the relationship between one letter and another in the ‘real’ alphabet and then the relationship between the letters in the ‘real’ alphabet and the alphabet being used to make the cipher. These relationships are mathematical – to do with sequences. In this sense, this reminds us that the alphabet I’m using now, when viewed as a sequence, is random, more random than counting from one to twenty-six, where the sequence of numbers corresponds to the principle of increasing a quantity by one ata time. Nothing is added when you say the alphabet from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ and nothing is taken away when you say it ‘Z’ to ‘A’. It’s not even arranged according to any principle of how the letters are used when we speak or write.
    There’s a reminder here of what the alphabet does beyond the matter of representing sounds. In ‘A is for Alphabet’ and ‘B is for Battledore’, I’ve shown a rather limited and elemental view of the alphabet. When we embed the alphabet in its real and actual use, we can see that it is a necessary part of a chain which goes far further than ‘representing sounds’. So, apart from when simply writing out the alphabet or playing with the letters as objects in themselves, we do not use the letters randomly. In use when writing, we group them according to what we want them to do when making words (and, on occasions, exclamations and interjections, and, with onomatopoeia, an imitation of sounds we hear).
    Moreover, we don’t make words randomly either. We put words into sequences or ‘strings’, governed by the grammars we invent. And we invent grammars in order to make sense. So while the alphabet is random, and while we say ‘letters represent sounds’, in fact, the full picture is: ‘letters are there for us to make sense’.
    To give an obvious example: the letters ‘d’ and ‘e’ exist side by side in the alphabet. No one knows why they do. Saying ‘side by side’ is in its own way a bit of maths or geometry. In fact, all the letters are equidistant from the ones next to them. The ‘D’ is like ‘E’ in the way ‘A’ is like ‘B’ or the way ‘U’ is like ‘V’: they are side by side. As a result, one way in which letters in the alphabet relate is that they are related to each other by similar or different distances. So, we might say, ‘B’ is like ‘L’ because they are both five letters away from ‘G’ (one forwards, one back, but the distance is the same). This kind of thing iswhat Caesar, Alberti, Scherbius and the rest were able to see and use.
    However, back with ‘D’ and ‘E’: when we use them in language, we call on them to do a job based on linguistic principles, not mathematical ones. We do this frequently in English when saying – and therefore writing – ‘I walked from the bus stop to the station.’ This is the ‘-ed’ ending we invented in order to indicate that something happened earlier or ‘in the past’. In that sense, no matter what sound or sounds they make, ‘E’ and ‘D’ help us position events in relation to where we are now. Letters in context are doing a job in helping us make sense. This way of making sense is through ‘morphology’ – that is, the making and changing