ALPHABETICAL FUN

The Alphabet as a Literary Constraint

Image from Usefulcharts.com

A while ago, curiosity led me to research the history of our alphabet, which dates back almost three millennia to the Phonecians. They adapted a system developed in Mesopotamia with some influence from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Scrabble fanatics might like to know the lovely word abjad that I discovered during my research. It represents alphabets that are consonantal ( no symbols for vowels, or only use diacritical marks above the letters to indicate vowels).

“Alphabet” is an interesting word because it derives from the first two letters in the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. In Phonecian and Hebrew, they are Aleph (a symbol which was originally on its side and represented the horned head of an ox ) and Bet, the floor plan of a simple two-box house. “Beth” is the word for house in Hebrew today.

Our alphabet, the most widely used in the world, has five vowels, 20 consonants, and the slippery “y” which is sometimes vowel, sometimes consonant. When you see signs for struggling-to-be-quaint pubs, tea houses, and inns that begin with “Ye Olde…,” remember the Y is derived from a Futhark rune called thorn, and is pronounced as “th.” The most frequent letter in English texts is E; the least frequent is Q.

If you want to know where the other letters come from, you can easily research this yourself. My topic today is how literary writers have used the alphabet both as a formal structuring device, and just to have fun with. Common for beginning readers is the alphabet book that begins with something like “A is for Apple,” accompanied by illustrations. How about for grown-ups? To liven up the following literary history, I’ll include a few alphabetical puzzles for you to consider (play fair, no Googling); the answers will come at the end.

Puzzle 1: Name a word in English that has all the vowels in order, including a final “y.”

Lipograms

These are texts that take on constraints such as avoiding one letter throughout, or avoiding several letters. It’s one of the techniques used by the French experimental writing group OULIPO (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; approximately: "workshop of potential literature.”) Founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, other members were novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud. Queneau said Oulipians were "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape." (Wikipedia)

Image from The Paris Review.

Preceding OULIPO, in 1939 Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby, one of the first lipogram novels, scorning the letter E throughout. Perec's La disparition is another novel written without E — “Perec would go on to write with the inverse constraint in Les Revenents, with only the vowel “e” present in the work.” (Wikipedia)

Canadian writer Christian Bök created a highly-regarded “univocal lipogram” of his own, Eunoia. Each chapter uses only one vowel, working through A, E, I O and U in turn. His book won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize. “Eunoia,” by the way, is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels.

Some writers have used the reverse lipogram (Wikipedia.com): “each word must contain a particular letter, the opposite concept of a standard lipogram.”

Puzzle 2: Name a word in English whose first five letters include the first five letters of the alphabet (if not quite in the correct order)

Alphabetical Poems

“An ABC poem is a poem where each line of the poem begins with a letter in the alphabet, starting with A and moving in order through Z... There are various types of ABC (or Alphabet) poems. Some use all 26 letters.” (www.familyfriendpoems.com). Variations on this form include using only some of the alphabet’s letters to start each line, but still in alphabetical order; or using all 26 letters, but jumbling up the order.

I recently used the alphabetical form to generate (without AI!) some semi-random text of my own for a spoken-word-with-music piece titled “Alphabet of Knives. ” Using an additional constraint, I included some variation of “knife” in each stanza, since the sound track was created by twanging a kitchen knife on a hard surface. Here’s the first stanza.

Albert Beasley Caught Devils Every Fortnight. Ghouls Harnessed Island Jamaica. Knifing Little Magic, Nomads Offered Pencils. Quirky Rangers Sued Totality. Understanding Very Wise Xylophones. Zero.

To hear what the recording sounds like, go to Bandcamp, and look for the Hypnagogic album Tip of My Tongue, or copy this link:

Puzzle 3: Name a word in English that is at least nine letters long, with only one letter that is a vowel.

Image from carolinestarrrose.com

Acrostics

Another form of constrained writing is the acrostic poem, in which the first letter of each line spells out the alphabet itself, someone’s name (often the author’s, or a patron’s), or a message.

“Acrostics are common in medieval literature, where they usually serve to highlight the name of the poet or his patron, or to make a prayer to a saint. They are most frequent in verse works but can also appear in prose. The Middle High German poet Rudolf von Ems, for example opens all his great works with an acrostic of his name, and his world chronicle marks the beginning of each age with an acrostic of the key figure (Moses, David, etc.).” (Wikipedia). A variation is to hide the key letters in the middle or at the end of each line, a difficult-to-decipher style that spies have used as coding.

Here are the first five lines of Lewis Carroll’s “A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky ode to Alice Liddell, also the inspiration for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

A boat beneath a sunny sky,

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,

Eager eye and willing ear…

Puzzle 4: Name a word in English that that is at least seven letters long, having only a singular vowel, “y.”

Vowels as Inspiration

The literary prodigy Arthur Rimbaud wrote a striking poem titled Voyelles (“Vowels.”). He characterized each vowel as having different colours, suggestions, and moods, much in the way that some composers of music feel specific keys are associated with particular emotions. Classical-music.com comments on this latter point: “For centuries, people have claimed that musical keys have special qualities of their own. In the Baroque era, whole treatises were written on the subject. It’s been said that E flat major is warm, D flat major is spooky, and E flat minor is seriously unhinged. Keys have colours too, apparently: E major has been described as sapphire blue, A flat major as purple, and D major as golden. Composers and performers who experience the condition of synaesthesia will understand this well.”

Here, courtesy of allpoetry.com, is an English translation of Voyelles:

Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O – vowels,

Some day I will open your silent pregnancies:

A, black belt, hairy with burst flies,

Bumbling and buzzing over stinking cruelties,

Pits of night; E, candour of sand pavilions,

High glacial spears, white kings, trembling Queen Anne's Lace;

I, bloody spittle, laughter dribbling from a face

In wild denial or in anger, vermilions;

U,… divine movement of viridian seas,

Peace of pastures animal-strewn, peace of calm lines

Drawn on foreheads worn with heavy alchemies;

O, supreme Trumpet, harsh with strange stridencies,

Silences traced in angels and astral designs:

O…Omega…the violet light of His Eyes!

I hoped you’ve enjoyed this brief ramble through some of the literary uses of the alphabet as constraint or inspiration. Here’s the answers to the puzzles.

Puzzle Answers:
1. Abstemiously; facetiously. 2. Abcedarian. 3. Strengths. 4. Rhythms.

Given the number of words in English, you may well have come up with alternative answers that fit the criteria. If so, share them with us in a comment here!