Michael Rosen Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Michael Rosen muses on the mysteries of the alphabet, a topic he explores in Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story

As daily viewers of films, we regularly accept something odd: the focus pull. We look at a scene in which, say, there is some blurry stuff on one side of the screen while in the distance someone is going about their business. Then, for no immediate apparent reason, the blurry stuff stops being blurry and we suddenly start to see someone or something who has some kind of relation to that first figure. Without the use of lenses, we're able to do something similar with the alphabet. For much of the time, particularly when we're reading, the alphabet is out of focus. Unlike the blurry film, though, it is more as if we both look with it and through it at the same time!

So, when we're learning to read, we learn any or all of these: the names of letters, the sounds of letters, the sounds of combinations of letters and we learn how in English, the match between letters and sounds is not 100% regular. Sometimes letters can denote different sounds: the 'ch' in 'machine' asks us to make a different sound from the 'ch' in 'chapter'. Sometimes a given sound can be denoted in different ways: in most dialects of English 'crow' rhymes with 'though', 'so', 'sew', 'beau' or 'oh'. Yet, we would never be able to read for the purpose of ...