Our alphabet is history’s junk drawer. Why Q Needs U author Danny Bate traces letters back through 4,000 years of pictures, invasions, and happy accidents. Full show notes: https://www.jordanharbinger.com/1362 Topics: 0:00 The Alphabet is Technology 2:00 Why Should Anyone Care About the Alphabet? 3:36 The Weird Extra Letters (ß, Thorn, and Accent Marks) 5:00 The Core Latin Letters the Romans Would Recognize 7:07 Why Latin Letters Are So Angular (The Stone Theory) 8:02 The Alphabet Is Older Than Rome 8:53 Uppercase Came First, Lowercase Came Later 10:17 Is Cursive Dead? And Are Letters Next? 12:29 Will Writing Disappear When We Just Dictate? 15:20 The Neuralink Thought Experiment 17:57 Did Ancient People Think Writing Was Weird? 18:54 The Inca Ran an Empire With No Writing 20:03 Egyptian Hieroglyphs Actually Had Sounds 21:57 How Hieroglyphs Became an Alphabet 24:16 Who Invented Hieroglyphics? 24:47 Coptic, Chaldean, and "Sacralized" Dead Languages 26:46 How a Drawing of an Ox Became the Letter A 28:41 The Semitic People Who Invented the Alphabet 30:27 Why "Alphabet" Means Ox + House 31:04 Hebrew Vowel Dots: The "Training Wheels" of Writing 32:53 The Alphabet Is a Compression Technology 35:37 Why the Alphabet Beat Hieroglyphs and Cuneiform 39:52 Chinese Writing: The Big Counterexample 43:00 The Capital A Is an Upside-Down Ox Head 43:37 Boustrophedon: Writing That Switches Direction 45:26 Which Languages Still Write Right-to-Left 46:30 How Much of This Story Is Actually Proven? 49:15 The Manuscript That Almost Got Wrecked by New Evidence 52:00 What's Going On With the Letter W? 52:57 Why Letters Stay the Same but Sounds Change 55:39 The English Alphabet Is a Junk Drawer 57:21 Why English Spelling "Makes Too Much Sense" 59:26 The Printing Press Froze English Spelling in the 1400s 1:00:48 Why English Can't Reform Its Spelling 1:03:29 The Impossible Task of an American Standard 1:06:05 The Letter Q Was Secretly a Monkey 1:07:44 Why X Is So Hard to Use 1:09:17 If He Could Change One Thing About English 1:10:16 The Best Letter Origin Stories (W and R) 1:12:50 What Will the Alphabet Look Like in 1,000 Years? 1:15:06 The One Thing to Notice Next Time You Read For business inquiries email: justin@jordanharbinger.com Welcome to The Jordan Harbinger Show, a video podcast where each week you get to join a conversation with some of the world’s highest performers and incredible personalities. I’ll ask them the tough questions to tease out their top tips so that you can reach levels of personal growth and mastery that you never imagined possible. Learn more about Jordan: http://jordanharbinger.com/about #podcast #jhs #etymology