A great many years had passed since I learned the phonetic alphabet. It began with a chart in a linguistics book in father’s shop. There was no reason for my interest at first, other than that I had nothing to do one weekend and was enamored of the signs and symbols it contained. There were familiar letters and foreign ones. There were capital N’s that weren’t the same as little n’s and capital K’s that weren’t the same as little k’s. Other letters, n’s and d’s and s’s and z’s, had funny little tails and loops attached, and you could cross h’s and i’s and u’s as if they were t’s. I loved these wild and fanciful hybrids: I filled pages of paper with m’s that turned into j’s, and v’s that perched precariously on tiny o’s like performing dogs on balls at the circus. My father came across my pages of symbols and taught me the sounds that went with each. In the international phonetic alphabet, I discovered, you could write words that looked like math, words that looked like secret code, words that looked like lost languages.

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