Hi, everyone. Welcome to this bonus episode of the History of English podcast.

Unfortunately, I don't have a new episode of the podcast ready this week. I hope to have one ready next week.

But the reason I don't have a new episode ready is because I finally committed myself to finishing that alphabet series, which I've been mentioning from time to time.

And I'm happy to report that that series is finally ready.

So I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about it, and I'm also going to include a chapter of that series at the end of this episode.

So you will have something new if you listen all the way to the end.

First of all, just to give you a little bit of background about the series, I decided to do a series about the history of the alphabet after I began the podcast.

A few listeners contacted me after I did the episode about the letter C early on, and they asked if I was going to explore the history of the other letters of the alphabet.

And at the time, that wasn't really my intention.

There's certainly some overlap between the history of the alphabet and the history of English.

But I really intended to bring in the alphabet information in bits and pieces from time to time when it fit in with what I was discussing in the podcast.

But I gave it some thought, and I finally decided that I was going to go ahead and put together an extra episode or two dedicated to the alphabet.

But when I started on it, I quickly realized you can't really do the topic justice in just a couple of episodes.

So I gave it some more thought and decided that I was going to go ahead and pursue it kind of like I did in that early episode about the letter C.

And the net result of all of that is that now that I'm done with it, the series clocks in at about five hours.

So there's a lot of information in there.

The series begins with a look at the overall history of the alphabet from the early forms of writing in the Middle East to the early Semitic alphabet and the Phoenicians and Greeks and so on.

So some of that information I've covered in earlier episodes of this podcast, but the material is much more focused in this series and it goes into some additional details that I didn't go into in the podcast.

And then what I do is I actually explore the history of the individual letters.

And just like that episode on the letter C, the history of certain letters is closely connected to other letters.

So I've grouped the letters together so I can explore them in groups and this actually works much better than trying to go through each individual letter.

You can actually see how the various letters are interconnected by doing it that way.

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