Paul Mathis's new letter: The the or not the the, that is the question Proper alphabets have names for the letters which hint at a powerfully poetic universe behind these mystic signs. Aleph, the first letter in Hebrew, means "ox," and Beth "house." The letter Ћ comes from Glagolitic, the Slavonic alphabet used for arcane liturgies that brought God from heaven to earth behind gilt iconostases in the dimness of incense smoke glowing with the light of beeswax tapers. In Old Church Slavonic, the Glagolitic version of tshe was called Djervь, "Tree." Other letters were Earth, Life, Peace and Worm. So Mr Mathis, or perhaps MaЋs, might call his letter Tree - if he had not come along several hundred years too late. For what I've been bursting to say is that there has been an English letter all along that does his work for him. It is called Thorn. The Anglo-Saxons borrowed Thorn from the stone-wrought world of runes. Those runes had names like Ice, Birch, Hail, Ulcer - a chill and painful cosmos. We Angles, Saxons and Jutes also borrowed the runic letter Ash but wrote it æ. It was named after the ash tree. When the cosmic ash-tree Yggdrasil rots, the world will end. Our ashes are dying. It makes you wonder. Anyway, most Anglo-Saxon letters dwindled and died (though Yogh found a niche in names like Menzies, disguised as a zed). But Thorn throve. It came into its own in an abbreviation of the. Thorn looks like this: þ. To represent the, scribes added a titchy-witchy e above it. I don't know who the first tom-fool noddle was who read an old manuscript and mistook Thorn+e for Ye. The idiocy, however, caught on. Ye Olde Rising Sunne and Ye Olde Tea Shoppe were duly fitted out with distressed name-boards. While patronising the Middle Ages, the new illiteracy willed itself into a state of inspissated ignorance. I don't blame Mr Maþis for it entirely, but we now find that holding a pen for the duration of filling one side of writing paper makes our hand ache. We cannot even read the regular writing of the merest shop girl or post office clerk from 100 years ago. If it's simplicity and speed we're after, what better than the Pitman short form . for the? Just a dot. Yet a far better answer is not to make writing easier but to make it more difficult. Bring back the distinction between long ess (like an f) in the middle of a word and short ess (s) at the end. Reintroduce ligatures. In old printed books, pairs of letters such as ct or fi had a joined-up form. This meant that when the printer was setting up the page in type, he had to remember to reach into a different part of the case to use the proper ligature. The same might be found by nimble manipulation of the computer keyboard Caps, Ctrl, Alt and Alt Gr. If Mr M approves, we could also soon have a whole zoo of symbols representing common words. In English, the most common words after the are be, to and of. They could be typed using the pilcrow ¶, the obelisk † and the signum sectionis §. "† ¶ or not † ¶," as Hamlet said. Obelisk pilcrow or not obelisk pilcrow? To pose the question is to answer it.