The lost letters of the English alphabet | Hacker News Reader

The lost letters of the English alphabet

omgfacts.com

526 points2dvisio195 comments

This is kind of interesting as this weekend I randomly came across the history of &. It was once taught as the 27th letter of the alphabet and was read as "and". To make it clearer when reciting the alphabet, students were taught to say "X, Y, Z and per se and" for X, Y, Z, &. (per se in this case meaning by itself). Eventually "and per se and" became ampersand. :)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand]

There's even more fun history, in that & is a ligature of et. (Citation: same wikipedia page)

While on the subject, this is why you may see et cetera abbreviated as etc and &c. And if you think of the latter as "et c" you have a popular website Etsy that sells et cetera.

I really wanted to believe that was Etsy's etymology, but alas it is not:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/04/22/website.name.origins.mf...

(Not sure if that's what you were implying, clever idea though.)

I wish that page had mentioned that Bing is derived from "Bing is not Google" ... even if it isn't true ;-)

Thanks for finding an actual source on this!

I've had so many people tell me there wasn't a directory called /etsy when I tell them to cd to /etc.

You actually say it like etsy? I've always said something like "et-k" or just etcetera in full.

Not OP but I always say "etsy", and "etsy-d" for etcd. I have never explored if these are correct pronunciations or not...

I have also always pronounced /etc as "etsy". I'm always thrown off when people say "ee tee see" or "etcetera", but that's pretty rare in my experience.

The people who pronounce /usr as "you ess are" instead of "user" kind of drive me crazy though.

I almost always have to say "you ess are" because while many people I talk to confuse etc and etsy, nearly everyone tries to type "/user" when I tell them to go to "forward slash user". Even people who should know better.

Interesting. I wonder if the "forward slash" bit is making people start thinking literally rather than making associations to what they already know?

If I'm talking about a common system location, I don't even mention the slashes, e.g. "user bin", "etsy init dot dee", "var log httpd" and so on. If someone started off telling me to go to, say, "forward slash user forward slash library" I would just start transcribing /user/library, assuming it was something nonstandard. For /usr/lib, I'd expect to just hear "go to user lib".

yeah, sometimes it actually is spelled user though. Like I think Macs have /usr as well as /User dirs in the root.

I've always called /etc "etss", /usr "user", /tmp "temp", /var "varr" (like a pirate would I guess), and /dev "dev".

Then again, I never liked "scuzzy" for SCSI, it felt awkward in conversation even with other techies. It grew on me about the time the protocol was dying out.

Also..."gif" as in "gift" or "jif" as in the peanut butter? ;-)

I came of age in IT around 2005/2006, and it took me a really long time to connect the "scuzzy" people were talking about with SCSI as written. I always kinda liked the pronunciation though, once I figured out what it was referring to.

GIF as in gift, and all the other root-level directories you named, I'm on the same page as you.

My high school graduation present in 1995 was a TI TravelMate 4000M laptop computer. It had no built in CD-ROM drive (I don't think any laptop did until the late 90s) but it had a full size SCSI port on the back. I promptly went to the local electronics superstore and asked for a "Ess See Ess Eye" external CD-ROM drive. The clerk looked at me like I was smoking something, then said "Oh, you mean a 'scuzzy' drive, sure we've got those!" I distinctly remember thinking at first the guy must not be proud of his product lineup. A few moments later the acronym and his pronunciation clicked and I felt really embarrassed.

I've never been able to say "scuzzy". My grandparents used that word to mean trashy or dirty people, and I've never been able to use it in a professional context.

"gif" as in the Dutch word for poison, with the hard "g".

/usr may be pronounced "user" for convenience, but it was conceived as "Unix System Resources directory", not "user directory".

I believe that's a backronym.

http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/usr....

In current Unices, /usr is where user-land programs and data (as opposed to 'system land' programs and data) are. The name hasn't changed, but it's meaning has narrowed and lengthened from "everything user related" to "user usable programs and data". As such, some people may now refer to this directory as meaning 'User System Resources' and not 'user' as was originally intended.

I like "oo-zer" which is both easier to say and less confusable with "user".

In ye olden days oft UNIX, users home directorys lived in /usr/username.

It always surprises me a little when I 'ls /' and /etc is up the top rather than at the very end. Mentally i've always placed 'etc' at the end, from 'et cetera'/'so on and so forth'/'misc'/'appendix'...

Americans often say "ect" (spelled out †). As a Dutch person (when talking in Dutch we say this as "etc" (eat tea sea) or "et cetera") it is very hard for me to not do the lord's work and correct them. And I guess it works if you abbreviate it as Et CeTera.

† edited to add that it's spelled out

I'm pretty sure I have never encountered "ect" from any person of any nationality.

I've heard people say "ek cetera" quite a bit.

I've always heard it pronounced incorrectly as "ek setra". And now I'm wondering if it's unusual to pronounce the last word with all three syllables, as I do...

If you hate this as much as I do, don't listen to Sweet and Tender Hooligan by The Smiths. It's a great song, but the last minute or so is horror.

Yeah, true. To the point where I suppose it's basically standard in a bunch of regional dialects.

I believe it's a common mispronounciation, but I have come across this quite often.

I've lived my whole life in the United States, lived I two very different and distance parts, traveled around the country.

I've never heard this. like ever.

Ok, so our experiences differ. Not a big deal.

I think you may be hearing something else and interpreting it as "ect." I also am from the US and have never once in my entire life heard this.

People spell it e-c-t. I have heard it often. I can't help it that you haven't!

I have - and I distinctly remember doing it myself as a small child and being corrected by my teacher. (I'm English by the way).

I've heard people pronounce it "eck cetera" many, many times, presumably because they've never actually seen the word in print.

I've never heard anyone say "ect", which would imply that they've seen the word but can't read.

It's a common misspelling in America, similar to incorrect uses of your vs you're.

I've never heard an American spell out "etc.", correctly or not, in conversation; I'm having trouble believing that doing so, much less a particular incorrect way of doing it, is common generally among "Americans", though there may be some narrower regional or other subculture in which it is common.

I am American and say "ee tee cee" for /etc.. but this could possibly be because I taught myself computer science online when I was a kid and so never heard people say many of the terms out loud.

Does any other language pronounce "et cetera" with the "hard" C, as it would be said in Latin?

Occasionally, you might encounter a Latin-speaking pedant who says "Kaizar" (this could also be a German :)) and "et ketera", but it isn't the norm in US English anyway.

I don't know Latin (aside from common phrases) but in many Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian) the ‘C’ is only hard when followed by ‘a’, ‘o’ or ‘u’ (referred to as broad vowels in Irish/Gaelic).

How often is often? I've never seen that in my life.

And W is a ligature of 'UU'.

Ancient Greek has an interesting coincidental evolution here in that its specific character for representing `/w/` was, in the classical period, referred to as digamma, literally 'double-gamma', because it looks like two gammas. The sound of digamma follows a similar usage of English 'w'[1], in that it is a 'consonantal doublet' of the Greek upsilon (both upsilon and digamma are derived from the same Phonecian letter, waw). However, the character itself doesn't have the same convenient surface-to-deep mapping, and it ended up as the Latin alphabet 'F'.

If you want to one level deeper, the sound 'F' came to represent is the 'voiceless labiodental fricative'. This means it has a pairing in the pronunciation space with 'V', the 'voiced labiodental fricative'. So Greek 'Digamma' became Latin 'F' in form, which is paired with Latin 'V' which became English 'W' which originally was represented by Greek 'Digamma' in sound.

None of this really means anything, but it tickles my brain.

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[1] Albeit with very different evolutionary paths; English 'w' was used, in part, to allow representation of both Germanic and Latinate words.

Do you know how we ended with the w-g mapping between Germanic languages and French?

- William => Guillaume

- War => Guerre

- Wasp => Guêpe

- Waffle => Gauffre

All of these 'g's are pronounced as in "gas. "gu" makes the 'g' hard in front of vowels that would have made it soft.

It's thought to be part of a larger series of sound shifts that happened as Proto-Germanic branched off from Proto-Indo-European, called Grimm's Law[1]. Romance languages like French (along with other Indo-European languages, like Greek and Sanskrit), as far as we can tell, preserve more closely the original PIE sounds, with Germanic languages being the 'deviants'. It's also the reason why English has 'feather' and Romance languages have 'penna' or some derivative, and there are a bunch of other fun examples of cognates to be had.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law

Of the Grimm Brothers, the same responsible for Grimm's Fairy Tales. Jacob was a philologist in addition to a mythologist.

«Of the Grimm Brothers, the same responsible for Grimm's Fairy Tales. Jacob was a philologist in addition to a mythologist.»

It's fun because the myth collection was almost a side effect of the linguistics work: it shouldn't be a surprise that when the Brothers Grimm walked into a small village and asked for the oldest documents the village could find they got a lot of interesting myths and fairy tales in return. There's a bit of dramatic irony that Grimm's Fairy Tales has had such a homogenizing force on the myths since its publication when a lot of the reason for collecting them in the first place for the Grimms was seeking all the little nuances and differences and distinctions between them (including and especially linguistically).

Many thanks :-)

More 'VV', per traditional Latin spelling. 'U' is a relatively new letter.

TL;DR: I personally thing both 'UU' and 'VV' are equally correct, given the history of the Latin alphabet's evolution.

Given the subject matter, I'd disagree slightly, but we're getting into obscure territory: 'U' and 'V' were glyphs of the same letter, but the two glyphs ended up being used to represent the vowel and consonant respectively as new letters. 'V' was traditionally the glyph used in writing and carving owing to it being the easier glyph to carve with a chisel. In Roman Rustic caps (as seen in Virgil's writings), the 'V'/'U' was halfway in-between a 'V' and a 'U' in shape.

When I say I disagree, I'm not saying you're wrong, BTW, so much that differentiating between 'U' and 'V' up until the late Middle Ages is difficult, complicated by the fact that the shift from 'UU'/'VV' to 'W' happened over a very long period of time, overlapping, IIRC, with 'U' and 'V' becoming separate letters.

To add some history to your opinion: In English we call it "double-u", whereas in French it is "double-v". It seems even at the time of invention there was a difference of opinion as to which letter w was doubling.

I would argue that w is a ligature of double-v but since the latin v was pronounced like todays u, its pronounced double-u.

Works very well in english and other European languages.

Uuindouu... One cant help but make a w sound.

Vvindovv... Not so much.

Also in Spanish and Italian. And given that these three are all neo-latin languages, unlike English, I strongly suspect that the real origin of w is from VV, not UU.

> neo-latin

You mean 'Romance': Neo-Latin refers to the revived Latin from the Renaissance era, which is now used as a source of international scientific vocabulary.

> I strongly suspect that the real origin of w is from VV, not UU.

This is why I wrote what I wrote: the timeline for that doesn't match up. The 'W' ligature came along when 'V' and 'U' were glyphs of the same letter, not separate letters themselves. In fact, 'V'/'U' was generally pronounced when spelling it out the way you would've said 'U' at the time, with the name 'V' got coming later.

In essence: it's equally right to say 'W' came from 'VV' as it is to say it came from 'UU', as they were the same thing up until surprisingly recently, to the extent that 'U' and 'V' weren't differentiated in French until the mid-1700s.

There's also the interesting question of language differences. While a single letter might have been good enough for Latin, Italian, French, etc. German has a stronger need for three, as shifting pronunciation of "v" as a consonant to become practically the same as "f" strangely wastes a letter and requires a new letter (which turned out to be "w") for the old sound. Meanwhile, German also has "u" and "ü" as vowels.

Traditionally, the uppercase was written as 'V' and the lowercase as 'u', though sometimes the lowercase would be written as 'v' at the beginning of a word (compare with 's', which was written as 'ſ' except at the end of a word).

It's not so much that 'U' was created as a brand-new letter as it was that they split 'V' and 'u' into separate letters.

Traditionally, there was no uppercase and lowercase. These were actually just stylistic variations of the same letters. First, there were majuscules (uppercase only), then came minuscules (lower case). Following another trend of highlighting certain letters, e.g., the first in a sentence, for example in red ink, eventually majuscules were used for this purpose. Thus, uppercase and lowercase.

Edit: "u" was another stylistic variation of "v" in minuscule alphabets. So the use of both of them side by side is rather an anachronism as it combines forms of two separate eras.

Edit: Regarding the long form of "s", this is also an important part of the ligature "ß". There's still an ongoing discussion, whether it is for "ſs" (ss) or "ſʒ" (sz), and, if "ß" should be split into "SS" or "SZ" in German uppercase writing. (While entity escaping suggests "szlig", some sources and old typographic forms indicate that it may have been "ſs" originally.)

And the reason that they are named "uppercase" and "lowercase" is that in the early days of movable type, the majuscule letters were stored in a case above the miniscule letters.

Furthermore, Roman and Italic are two entirely different styles of characters. For highlighting purposes, printers started using Italic within Roman text, and eventually pairs of Roman and Italic fonts became identified with each other, so that now typefaces generally include both of them.

It may also be interesting that these styles of writing characters originally went with different styles of filling a page. Around the first millennium horror vacui reigned the scriptoria and scribes tended to fill the whole of the page with as least of white space as possible. If there was space left at the end of a line or page, the last words were repeated, often framed by "va (...) cat". This style coincided with broken letter styles favoring the similarities in the various character forms.

(We may observe that the upcoming use of white space in writing in order to structure text roughly coincides with the introduction of zero into the number system. We may also observe that the use of zero was already implied by the Roman abacus, but didn't propagate to writing numbers. This may be seen in the context of Roman writing dismissing interpunctuations originally imported from the Greek and eventually also dismissing spaces between words, as it was considered important for a reader to immerse in the text in order to reveal its meaning. This approach to writing and reading may also shed some light on the horror vacui that may be observed in medieval writing. For an opposite approach we may consider the Summa Theologiae, breaking down the text in structure and form so it provides a quick and easy orientation for where in the text we currently are. This approach brings also some new characters, like "¶" to mark the beginning of a paragraph. – Historically, there's been an ongoing discussion whether to favor legibility or rather illegibility in writing and letter forms, which is linked to the question, whether a text should reveal its meaning quickly, or rather resist a cursory reading.)

All of that is correct, but I was thinking more of the Shakespearean era after the modern use of uppercase/lowercase arose but before V and U split into different letters. So back then you had, for example, "love" written as loue.

The way I came to think of it when I studied Latin: V is the consonant version of U, just as J is the consonant version of I.

When you put those vowel sounds next to another vowel (assuming a certain Romance pronunciation similar to modern Spanish or Italian), they tend to make that consonant sound (similar to English W or the consonant version of Y).

Check out NativLang on YouTube I think you'll like it.

Curiously, the article mentions Icelandic for æ, but not for ð or þ, which are still on regular use in modern Icelandic, pretty much in the same Old English meaning of dental fricatives (ð is voiced, þ is voiceless).

Just a small clarification: in OE ð and þ were used interchangeably. Between voiced sounds they were pronounced as in Modern English "then", otherwise as in Modern English "thin".

Speaking of þ, it has a role is the oddball "Ye" in "Ye Olde ..." form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde#History

Thanks for linking this. I'd read previously that the use of the letter y in "ye olde..." was from simplifying the typesetting of thorn but the article here claims eth was used in the original spelling. Is there more to the story or is the article wrong?

Yea I read that too. It might have been wrong. It appears (from this author) that eth was the 'hard TH' (say: that) and thorn was the 'soft TH' (say: with)

Eth and thorn were interchangeable in Old English. The article is incorrect.

The th sound in that is exactly the same as the th sound in with.

It depends on dialect. In American English, the th in that is voiced;

   /ðæt/

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/th...

In my dialect, the th in with is unvoiced, though it looks like it is voiced in others:

   /wɪð/ /wɪθ/

http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/wi...

"thin" might be a better example that is more consistently pronounced with the unvoiced 'th'?

Indeed, thin is the examplar given in Wikipedia for /θ/.

It also has further explanation of th is sometimes voiced and sometimes unvoiced depending on context.

One thing to note is that some English speakers pronounce /ð/ and /θ/ as allophones, likely due to their identical orthography. At the beginning and middle of words, it becomes voiced /θɪn/ and /θɪŋ/ (thin and thing) becoming /ðɪn/ and /ðɪŋ/, respectively. At the end of words, it remains unvoiced.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_fricative

th-fronting always catches my attention as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting

Indeed, and œ would be close Icelandic ö (in ASCII-only systems umlaut ö is still often rendered as oe). The 'yogh sound' for words like 'loch' is really the only one altogether missing from modern Icelandic.

I always presumed that the œ ligature was later collapsed into ø, which is how Danish and Norwegians write the letter ö.

ö in Icelandic and Swedish is phonetically equivalent to ø in Danish and Norwegian.

However the æ in Danish and Norwegian is like the OE one described in the article, between a and e, which is written ä in Swedish. Icelandic does not have that sound, and uses æ in the Latin way, representing the ai diphthong (as in English "fine").

The more common vowels also have fairly different pronunciations in the four languages.

The 'issue' is that English is not really it's own language :)

Or rather, it's a relatively modern language.

1000 years ago there would have been forms of Germanic, Scandinavian and French being spoken - and 'English' developed as a mangle of those.

The proper French people I know do not consider English to even be a proper language. :_

And many English people are racist towards French people as well. Let's not encourage either group...

I don't think its racist for a French person to consider 'English' to not be a language proper. The French lady who made the comment made her case remarkably well.

Unfortunately that French attitude is also somewhat apparent in the way many French people speak English. English is not really its own language, so not worth learning properly. (Or at least learn a pronunciation that is close enough to be understood.)

If this tickles your fancy, you should check out "Adventure of English" and the eponymous BBC documentary.

https://www.amazon.com/Adventure-English-Biography-Language/...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihoYL-dUK1g

Did you know that just about every English word that contains the letter combination "sk" is from Old Norse? Skin, sky, ski, skill, skid, skull, skip, skirt etc. Skim isn't though.

Until reading this book I never truly realized what sort of a Frankenlanguage English really is.

> Until reading this book I never truly realized what sort of a Frankenlanguage English really is.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll

> Did you know that just about every English word that contains the letter combination "sk" is from Old Norse? Skin, sky, ski, skill, skid, skull, skip, skirt etc.

Also, skirt and shirt are doublets. Skirt comes from Old Norse, and shirt is native English, and they both come from the same Proto-Germanic root.

If it wasn't, it might look like this: https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...

Other "Frankenlanguages" include Japanese, Tagalog, and Maltese.

Note that this wouldn't remove Norse influences, since Norse is also Germanic.

Half of those words make no sense in modern Norwegian. A run through of the list and their approximate pronunciations in English would be:

Skin: shin never heard this said, GooTranslate gives "full" but "full" is "hel" in Norwegian

sky: she meaning sky (the vast expanse above your head)

ski: shee meaning ski like a plank of wood strapped to you foot for travelling on snow.

skill: sheeel to divide or separate. Bears no relation to English that I know of.

skid: sheed not a word I know in Norwgian

skull: shool again, not a word I know in Norwegian, the word for skull is 'hode'

skip: ship a thing that floats and is bigger than a boat.

skirt: sheert not a word, but probably from skjørt meaning the same.

> Skin: shin never heard this said, GooTranslate gives "full" but "full" is "hel" in Norwegian

skinn in Norwegian, or skind in Danish.

> skill

Seems obsolete, I've only vaguely aware of this usage, and I'm a native speaker: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skill#Etymology_1

> skull

There's a skalli in Danish: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skalle

skill is not obsolete and is heard in everyday speaking as in "å skille ut".

I meant it was obsolete in English.

> sky: she

> ski: shee

> skill: sheeel

For a moment there I hoped you were just going to keep adding e's to as you went down the list.

It's quite hard for me to get across the slightly differing sounds as it'snot my native tongue. That is why I used "approximation" in my comment, but yes it does seem like an ever lengthening ee sound. The rule is that if the vowel is followed by a double consonant it's a short vowel, single consonant means long vowel, so bil = beel and bill = beeel. But as a non-native it can be very hard to distinguish during a conversation and I am often misunderstood. In fact, I'm not even sure I have the rule the right way around :(

Skin: "Dyreskinn"....

Skull: The word for skull is most definitly not "hode". It's "skalle", which is very similar.

Furthermore, not all dialects have the "sh" sound for sk.

That's a double-l.

The word for head is most definitely hode. Which is what I thought of.

Well, couldn't you use skalle for skull? Or hodeskalle? I'm not a native speaker, but my understanding is that hode is more general than the skull.

Ha, yesterday I even saw a sign over a low door upon which was written "skall skall ikke". So yes, you are correct with skalle. I have a terrible memory.

Surely English sk-word "skoal" is used in Norwegian.

There is a great podcast you might like on the subject: The History of English Podcast

https://history-podcasts.com/history-of-english-language-pod...

> from Old Norse

Isn't that just a fancy way to say they're from Old English (Anglo-Saxon/Englisc)? This shouldn't be too surprising considering the other main influence of the English language was Old French and the letter combination "sk" is far more common in Nordic languages than in French.

No. For instance, shirt is from Old English, while its cognate skirt is from Old Norse. We gained quite a bit of vocabulary from the Danelaw, and lost a lot of the grammatical complexity (gender and inflection) at the same time. Apart from vocabulary, French barely touched the English language; it was the Vikings that messed things up terribly by settling in with the common folk up north.

And many "french" were from Normandy i.e. barely reformed Norse. Just look at the name "nor man dy".

The Anglo-Saxons lived in England before the Vikings arrived. So no, they are two distinct languages. The Angles and the Saxons came from Northern Germany, long before the Vikings decided to invade. The Viking invasion was significant, heavily influencing English society and language. Many old towns in England still have the old Norse town ending -by.

Effectively, there are three main sources for English:

* The Anglo-Saxons, arriving around the time where the Romans left.

* The Vikings, arriving around 800-1000.

* The Normans, arriving around 1066.

Not that English haven't changed significantly since then, but these three periods represent the largest number of words increases. The other changes have primarily been spelling.

Also remember the Normands spoke not only French but some kind of Norse. Still in Normandy there are Norse/Scandinavian names for places. Besides, Saxon and Norse languages must've been pretty mutually intelligible, even today German and Swedish is pretty similar even with a millennium or two apart.

There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. As for the Norman influence, it was mostly vocabulary... but changing the languages of documentation to Latin (mostly) and French (in law, for the most part) left English a lot of room to progress away from the Old English that was, by that time, already playing the same sort of role that Latin did in the Early Romance period - it no longer reflected the language that people lived in.

> There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part.

It's why English nouns lost their masculine and feminine grammatical gender. The people who used both languages had more important things to worry about.

Haha, so Saxon and Norse cancelled each others' grammar out? :)

Creole languages have a very simplified grammar compared to their parent languages.

It all points to the case that English is actually a creole language.

English doesn't quite meet the criteria of being a creole, though.

Superstratum/substratum theory applies here. English has an Ingvaeonic superstratum and multiple substrata, from Old Norse and Norman French at least, if not more.

But from pretty closely related languages.

I didn't think French arrived as a language name until well after the Norman conquest?

Something romance then. Whatever derivative of Latin they used.

I actually learned something today.

I had always chalked up the Viking invasions to "more of the same" after the Anglo-Saxons had settled, but you're of course right that the two (well, three, I guess) groups came from different geographical areas and the Vikings would of course have spoken a distinctly different language.

I guess I conflated the common view that English is originally a Germanic language with French influences with "English is Anglo-Saxon plus French over time".

I vaguely recall hearing something about Aelfric's "neorxnawang" (Paradise) being a derivation from Old Norse "norn," though IIRC Grimm said this wasn't possible.

There is actually quite a debate around this now. Modern english is much closer to "scandinavian" than old english in sentence construction, so the new thesis is that old english words were adopted by the norse rulers into the norse/scandinavian language.

It has later been "perverted" by the french ;)

However I do not think this theory would fly in England even if the logic is sound due to nationalistic pride.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121127094111.h...

> However I do not think this theory would fly in England even if the logic is sound due to nationalistic pride.

Also, most linguists who are experts in the history of English (Faarlund is an expert on Norse, not English) tend to border on the dismissive when considering Faarlund's theory of English as Norse dialect.

Sounds strange to me that Danish rulers would import back sentence construction with such gusto all the way back to eastern Sweden? Is it not more likely the Danish sentence construction filtered down into common English with time?

I am a bit stuffed today due to a cold, what I tried to explain is that there is no "Old English" in modern english. It was wiped out during danelaw and replaced with scandinavian. They did however adopt local "Old English" words into scandinavian and eventually it evolved to modern english.

Scandinavian languages did not change due to this.

Read the article, they explain it much better than me ;)

Now that makes sense.

This is what wikipedia has to say on the topic "In addition, numerous common, everyday Old Norse words were adopted into the Old English language during the Viking age." I think I understand what you are hinting at but regardless, I'm leaning towards no, it's not just a fancy way of saying that.

Is that what wikipædia has to say?

I am fluent in Norwegian but moved to Norway as an adult from the UK and I still struggle with the words for shirt and skirt which are skjørt and skjorte, the sk is more of a sh sound, but the vowel in the middle I still cannot get right, those øs just don't fly with my accent.

Interestingly, in Scotland a lot more 'Norse' persists than in English with typical examples including kirk for church, pronounced shirk in Norwegian, and bairns for child much like barn in Norwegian. Other examples I can think of, not just in Scots but in English too, include tor for tower which is tårn in Scandiland (Google translate doesn't recognize tor as an English language word, even though it is used to describe towers all across the UK).

Part of the reason I love watching Scandinavian TV is to listen for snippets that sound just like Scottish-variant English (Scots is something else and neither are to be confused with Scotch).

To my ear the snippets even sound like they're said in a Scottish accent and emphasizes that there's no such thing as a 'pure' language as they all have elements of others which have migrated in.

I would be interested to see if there was a correlation between the linguistic mix and the DNA origins of these populations - perhaps a cool hypothesis/experiment for someone.

There are a few points wrong in this article. First of all the <y> of <ye> does not come from <ð> but from <þ>. Secondly in Old English the letters þ and ð are used promiscuously, voicing has nothing to do with it. In other languages this is different, but the article seems to be about english specifically.

Seems like you know quite a bit about the subject. Would you care to enlighten us with lesser knowledge about how <y> came from <ð> instead of <þ>?

The article says “ðe” became “ye” because of the voicing, but you say voicing plays no part – so as an amateur linguist I'm already confused.

Was “the” originally spelled “þe” instead of “ðe”?

The reason why thorn (þ) became synonymous with <y> is because the character evolved to look similar[1] so when the printing press was invented people used the similar looking <y> character in place of the thorn.

So the whole <y> / <þ> relationship wasn't born from pronunciation but rather technological innovation.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/EME_ye.s...

It wasn't a case of the character evolving. It was more that thorn didn't exist on printing presses imported from Germany where they had been invented and y was chosen as a common substitute.

Both happened. I did already mentioned the printing press point but there's a reason y was used specifically.

The thorn character originally looked more like the letter p but with time it lost the loop at the top of the character and became more like the letter y. (See [1] in my previous post for example)

Having grown up in England and never really paying this much attention to the etymology of the English language, I had always assume Ye to be pronounced exactly as it looks... Yee.

Am I right in interpreting what you're saying is that it's actually pronounced as "the" because the y is really just a print substitute because of the lack of thorn character on the press but would have still been pronounced when read as if it were the thorn character?

If that's the case, you have just unlocked a fascination of the English language I never had until this exact moment. Thank you, no more work is getting done today.

The "ye" business is the first thing the article mentions...

I got bogged down in the comment thread long before I read the article ;)

I never read the article first. I use the comments to decide if it is worthwhile, but very often I find the comments to be sufficiently interesting on their own and skip (not ship of course, I wonder where it comes from) the article altogether.

I've just found in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde

"The anachronistic use of "ye olde" dates at least to the late 18th century, as seen in the image at below right (image 1908). The use of the term "ye" to mean "the" is based in Early Modern English, in which the could be written as þe, employing the Old English letter thorn, þ. During the Tudor period, the scribal abbreviation for þe was EME ye.svg ("þͤ" or "þᵉ" with modern symbols); here, the letter ⟨þ⟩ is combined with the letter ⟨e⟩"

Wikipedia links to MW:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ye[2]

"Origin and Etymology of ye

alteration of Middle English þe the, from Old English þē; from the use of the letter y by printers and scribes of late Middle English to represent þ (th) of earlier manuscripts

First Known Use: 1551"

And finally:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Old_English

"The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, as was ð; unlike ð, however, thorn remained in common use through most of the Middle English period. Both letters were used for the phoneme /θ/, sometimes by the same scribe."

Others have answered your question quite well.

But as an interesting aside, one of the reasons spelling is so hard in English is because the printing press arrived just as the great vowel shift[1] was occurring. The printing press resulted in (somewhat, eventually) standardized spelling, but some words were "standardized" before and some after their vowels shifted. That means sometimes words are spelt like they sound (now) but other times they are spelled like they used to sound (or like the letters in them used to be pronounced).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

It was spelled "þe". As the writing of þ evolved, it got closer to a "y" and so this was chosen by printers as a replacement character. The Wikipedia page on the þ has a section for its use in the English language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#English

The other comments already explained it. I just wanted to add that we use <> to notate writing, so <þ> is the letter þ, not the sound. /þ/ and [þ] are the phoneme and the sound þ respectively (I don't want to go into details about the difference).

Yes, it was originally "þe". When printing presses came around, they didn't have a thorn character (because they were imported from countries that didn't use them), and so they used a "y" (in Gothic type, they look almost identical).

I'm pretty sure that the "Y" in "Ye olde" is a thorn, not an eth:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

since after the loss of wynn, the thorn was drawn to look like wynn (which is basically an uppercase "Y" with the left ascender in line with the descender and a loop on the right ascender).

If you're interested in discarded letters, this list has 12 letters (although the definition of "letter" is a little looser):

http://mentalfloss.com/article/31904/12-letters-didnt-make-a...

Not to forget the long S [0]. I got pretty confused with it the other day, when reading a old French book (a Lavoisier memoir on diamond combustion). It seems to have been quite popular in a variety of languages, giving the (nowadays) German ß. While this is technically an "s", the way it was written "ſ" can be confusing, as it is quite close to "f".

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

This is my favorite bit long-S trivia: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sun%2Cfun&year...

I had a bad experience on a bus in Vienna, trying to work out where the hell something "straBe" was, when the bus kept announcing "straße"

Yes, my German is pretty bad.

> While this is technically an "s", the way it was written "ſ" can be confusing, as it is quite close to "f".

And when set in italics, it looks like the integral symbol: ſ (depending on your font, it may or may not have a descender)

In fact, this is where Leibniz got the idea for the integral symbol: it stood for ſumma, Latin for "sum".

I did a university course on Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe - reading text that talked about familiars (mostly cats) "sucking on their mistress" took some getting used to with the long "s"!

I didn't know about the pronunciation of "ȝ", and the examples in the article about the silent "gh" helps explain some modern German/English cognates: "daughter/Tochter", "thought/gedacht", etc.

The northern dialect of Middle English that the Pearl poet wrote in ("The Pearl", "Gwain and the Green Knight") makes use of this letter, much more so than Chaucer's more southern English. It's actually possible to read Chaucer with the help of some vocabulary tips -- the Pearl poet, at least in my experience, is way harder.

yogh has some other, more subtle uses than the article mentions too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalziel

Also why Menzies is pronounced "mingiz": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menzies

McKenzie was originally pronounced this way as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mackenzie_(surname)

English: though Swedish: dock

Makes sense now. The Scandinavian pronunciation is one step harder on the scale with German in the middle.

Also dough, duff, dog, and dick, are all the same word (when used in traditional British cooking)

A little surprised by the downvote.

these cognates are how we get dishes like "plum Duff", and "spotted dick".

Grocery stores sometimes bowdlerize the latter to "Spotted Richard", but "Spotted Dog" would be more appropriate

And also hot dog. The 'dog' being the dough or bun, not the meat in the middle.

Wait, what? Do you have a cite for that, because everything I've seen calls the meat the dog. This use is from maybe the 1880s when any sausage was called a dog.

http://www.snopes.com/language/stories/hotdog.asp

Personally, I really wish þat we'd bring back 'þ' instead of 'th' (there's no real need for 'ð', since originally one is a rune and one is a variation on a Roman character, but if we wanted then we could use 'þ' for soft 'th' & ð for hard 'th').

I'm not terribly keen on reſtoring 'ſ', ſince it really is eaſy to confuſe for 'f.'

Given our modern orthography, I don't see any real need for 'ȝ' & 'æ,' as much as I like them both.

But honestly, 'þ' really ought to make a comeback.

I just want to see the use of diaereses come back for words like coöperate and reënter.

> I'm not terribly keen on reſtoring 'ſ', ſince it really is eaſy to confuſe for 'f.'

Depends on the font, really. It looks great in italics, especially when using a font that gives it a descender... looks more like the integral symbol than 'f'. It irks me, though, when fonts give ſ a half-crossbar in the roman. Fortunately, the monospace font I'm using when writing this reply doesn't do that, and it also gives ſ a sharper curve at the top left, so ſ and f look pretty distinct in it.

I want the ſt ligature to come back, though. It looks really slick.

> It looks great in italics, especially when using a font that gives it a descender... looks more like the integral symbol than 'f'.

It looks like the integral symbol for much the same reason uppercase sigma looks like the sum symbol.

It's interesting that Welsh orthography has these sounds, but makes different transliteration choices into the Latin alphabet.

For example, dd is used for eth (I once worked with a woman called "Dydd", presumably short for Meredydd), and ll is used for yogh.

Some people will argue about the correct capitalization of 'ff' when used in names like ffion.

My knowledge of welsh is limited to road signs and watching S4C whilst inebriated. The contribution of a native speaker would be appreciated.

Æi løved this. Please write måre.

As a Norwegian citizen I really loved this. Would love to see a blog about English words and names of places with Scandinavian origin. It goes for words like "trim" and places with names ending with -by.

Ask and you shall receive. Not quite a blog, men den får duge :)

https://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/vikings/v...

A database of hundreds names of places on the British islands with Scandinavian origins. Thanks a lot / Jævlig bra. :-)

I've been fascinated by this for years and years. I've known about thorn, but I didn't know about eth and how thorn and eth are pronounced differently.

FTFY :)

"English hæs alƿays been a living languæge, changing and evolving wiþ use. But before our modern alphabet was estæblished, ðe languæge used many more charæcters ƿe’ve since removed from our 26-letter lineup. ðe six ðæt most recently got axed are:"

FYI: `languæge` and `charæcters` don’t make much sense—‘æ’ and ‘œ’ usually changed to simple ‘e’ in modern English (Encyclopædia, mediæval), unless at the start of a word (æsthetics). There are variations, ‘œ’ seems to have been more likely to change to ‘e’ at the start of a word (œsophagus, œstrus).

Also, not every ‘ae’ was an ‘æ’—‘aerial’ is one example. I think the test is whether or not the Greek word used ‘αι’.

Are you trying to say that in modern English that œsophagus has become esophagus?

If so then you need to qualify it as American English; British English still uses oesophagus.

Yeah, I originally qualified everything and then figured most readers of the site are USian anyway ;)

Those of us outside the US would still see some usages; "encyclopædea" in particular isn't uncommon.

That's a ligature for the "ae" diphthong in Latin though, rather than the ash character of Old English. There's also an "oe" diphthong, hence "oestrogen", "foetus".

British usage usually preserves the "a" and "o" in those diphthongs.

And Latin used ae "to transliterate the Greek diphthong αι (alpha iota)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86)

Oe is also used in the same way I suppose, oestrogen for example comes from οιστρογόνο so in this case oe is transliterating omicron iota.

Some more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_of_Greek_origin#...

I was actually a bit disappointed that she doesn't mention all this in the article, "ae" is not aesthetical (another greek-derived word) ffs, it very often maintains the historical orthography of the word which I feel is very important.

Yes, "Encyclopædia Britannica" not English, it's Latin. "Encyclopædia Britannica" means "British Encyclopaedia" in English.

Fun fact: the æ ligature was only introduced to Latin during the early modern era.

Classical Latin just wrote out AE (and it was always in capitals because minuscule hadn't been invented yet). In the middle ages, after sound changes resulted in AE being pronounced just like E, they switched to ę (called e caudata, the little tail at the bottom being called a cauda). In the early modern era, scribal abbreviations fell out of fashion and they went back to writing the a... but they ligatured it with the e as æ in order to make it clear it was a single sound.

That's mostly because Encyclopædia Britannica is styled that way.

Which is because the word was made by french based on the greek εγκύκλιος παιδεία

εν-κύκλος (in circle) --> εγκύκλιος παιδεία (education)

The core, generalized education one should have.

Words like paedagogic etc are also spelled like this in english (uk) because the language maintains the historic spelling

Sadly, full of misinformation, half truths and bad conclusions.

I wish a linguist would write an article like this, or a response to it

And also sadly lacking in examples, which let's be honest, can't be too hard to come by.

Not only do I find this fascinating, I also find it fascinating how many of us here at HN find it fascinating (as witnessed by the number of comments and up-votes).

I'm loving the discussion, too!

My copy of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations still has economics written as œconomics.

I just appreciate that i learned something from someone named Poindexter.

If we just had one more of these letters, Base 64 encoding wouldn't need the / and would be URL friendly if you strip the trailing =. Dang.

Those interested in this might also be interested in the History of English Podcast: http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

Recent episodes have got up to the Early Middle English period, which is when the language's modern orthography began to take shape, including some of the now lost letters of the alphabet.

If only Q would follow them.

The letters C, Q, and X are redundant for representing sounds in English, but are used uniquely in Chinese pinyin, from which English might plausibly import thousands of words in the very near future.

It was absent from Old English, which used "cw" instead of "qu".

If this floats your boat, can I recommend an excellent book by Michael Rosen which combines whimsical prose with an interesting history of the english alphabet.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alphabetical-Every-Letter-Tells-Sto...

From reading old records in the cellars of churches and libraries in New England, I believe part of the progress of the writing of ð (eth) to y and then to "th" involved writing the y as a superscript at the beginning of words.

Any truth to this? Or was it just an oddball habit of New England scribes?

"Why Do We Have "Ye Olde"? Obsolete Letters, and the Mysteries of Ye Olde Ming", by Tom Scott

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVWvkZbhgAc

Ugh, great now I'll never read "Ye Olde" the same way.

It's fun pronouncing it 'correctly' though. As if English really has a "correctly" of course. And by fun I mean in a smug, self-satisfying way.

Yeah my New Years resolution is to stop being that guy that says "well actually" followed by something smug. I'm certain I've broken this already.

Well now I want to know when and why these disappeared!

I've read that thorn and eth were replaced with Y because printing presses were imported from Germany. They had Y, but lacked Þ and Ð, so Y was used instead.

I would think they mostly disappeared because the same sounds could be represented by combinations of letters in the Latin alphabet which was used and recognized universally throughout Western Europe.

They didn't have standardized fonts those days, but the method of reproducing literal material by manually copying manuscripts still encouraged towards a simpler set of characters, resulting in much the same kind of thing. I Guess the slightly simple Brother Jonas was told that "oh come on, you once again messed up your ð and now that parchment is ruined, why don't you just write th instead?"

Probably the same way the kaiser stole the word "twenty".

When traveling in Iceland recently it is useful to learn eth and thorn because they are all over the place

Icelanders seem to find our "Ye" interpretation to be stupefying and amusing.

I want to offer the author my most enthusiastic contrafibularities for this interesting ærticle.

Did these letters have an ordering in the otherwise A-Z alphabet sequence of today?

interesting how much ȝ resembles the arabic "ghayn" غ, which is the same sound.

So W won, and Wynn lost? FTW.

Alas, not for the wynn, as it were...

what about the long s?

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