asks why I am interested in alphabets. Those who’ve been reading this for longer will know that I’ve got a whole slew of memories on this, including a long draft internal memo which was never circulated, why ћ and ħ are different letters, and the problem of whether to write ţ or ț in Romanian. I’ve also set up an interactive language quiz on my own website inspired by the spoils of a visit to MacDonald’s last May.

But perhaps I should explain a bit more. Anyone who speaks more than one language fluently appreciates that it opens up not just a means of communication with people you couldn’t otherwise talk to, but also to an extent a different way of thinking about how you put sentences and ideas together. For instance, in German it’s a fact that sometimes the verb at the end of the sentence placed is. In Russian, there no equivalent for English “the” or present tense of verb “to be”. Yet Germans and Russians are able to communicate perfectly well.

And with alphabets it’s at a more basic level, that of sounds. In English we use the spelling “th” two completely different sounds spelt ð and þ in Icelandic (or “d” and “c” in Castilian Spanish) – compare the start of the words “the” and “thick”. In Serbian and Croatian there are two more sounds spelt ć and č (or ћ and ч in the Cyrillic alphabet). I find it very difficult to hear the differnce, though I have trained myself to orient my tongue differently depending. I find it fascinating that almost every language has a peculiar sound that no native speaker can ever hope to pronounce properly – English “u” in “cut”, similarly the French and Dutch short “u” pronounced differently from each other, the German short ü, the Russian ы, the Bulgarian ъ. And yet with a fairly small set of symbols we try and cover all of this diversity.

I’m particularly fortunate in that my work brings me into regular contact with several of the world’s alphabets, the Georgian, Armenian, Cyrillic, occasionally Greek, and our own dear Latin. (See the alphabets of Europe.) But I’m also inspired by the guy who started it all, who made me realise that my name could equally well be written

or even

and that it could still have been read by the learned folk of Middle Earth.

I look forward to the day when I can do that last bit in Unicode. Meantime we’ll just have to use the Tolkien transliterator.