How the Alphabet Was Made

The week after Taffy had drawn her famous first picture-letter (and caused a great deal of trouble), she went fishing with her Daddy again. Presently, sitting on the bank with a marrow-bone in her hand, she began to giggle.

'What?' said Tegumai.

'Wasn't last week funny!' said Taffy. 'Do you remember how the Head Chief puffed out his cheeks?'

'I remember,' said Tegumai. 'I had to pay the Stranger two soft deerskins with fringes to make up for the mud.'

'Well,' said Taffy, in a thinking voice. 'I've had a secret-surprise think. Daddy, make a noise. Any noise.'

'Ah!' said Daddy.

'You look just like a carp fish with its mouth open!' said Taffy, delighted. 'Do it again.'

'Ah! Ah! Ah!'

'Now, hold still.' Taffy took a piece of bark and a shark's tooth, and she drew a picture of a carp fish's open mouth. 'There,' she said. 'That is the ah-noise. Whenever we draw that, we shall know it means ah.'

'That's not bad,' said Daddy. He drew one himself, only better.

'Now make another noise,' said Taffy.

'Yah!' said Daddy.

'Two noises in one,' said Taffy. 'The end is ah, which we already have. What can we do about the beginning yer-yer-yer?'

'Draw the tail of the carp,' said Daddy. 'A tail is forked like Y. If a fish is standing on his head, we'd see the tail first.'

So they drew a forked tail, and put it next to the open mouth. YAH.

Then O. 'Just draw a round egg,' said Daddy. 'That's the shape your mouth makes.'

Then SSS. 'Draw a snake curling,' said Taffy. 'Snakes go ssss when they are thinking.'

Then SHH. They tried a spotted snake, but the spots were hard to draw. So instead, they used the ordinary snake for ssss, and drew a wooden pole beside it for shh (because when you SHH someone, you often shake a stick as well).

They worked all day. Then all the next day. Then the next.

They drew a whole family group for T (Tegumai, Teshumai, and Taffy — because all their names started with a T-sound). They drew a fish-hook for J. They drew an oyster shell for C. They drew a broken spear for L. They drew a curly snake backwards for Z. They drew a nose for N. They drew a beaver for B (the sacred beaver of their tribe). They drew a pike's mouth for G. They drew a bit of the winding river for W.

By the end, they had drawn a picture for every sound they could make. Twenty-six of them in all, once they had sorted through carefully.

They went home and showed Mummy, and Mummy was very impressed. They showed the Head Chief, who declared it a great invention.

'One day,' the Head Chief said, 'people will use these little pictures to write letters that always mean the same thing. And they will call it — well, I don't know what they'll call it. But it will be very, very useful.'

And so it was. The pictures were used again and again. Over the years — over thousands and thousands of years — they became simpler, easier to draw, more regular. The carp-mouth grew rounder and turned into A. The forked tail became Y. The round egg became O. The wiggly snake became S. And so on.

And that is how the alphabet you know today was made. Not all at once, but piece by piece, by a little girl called Taffy and her Daddy, on the banks of a river long ago.

(Freely retold for bedtime from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, 1902.)