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The 27th Letter

poetryfoundation.org

41 pointsdaddy_drank33 comments

Do I need a coffee or is this just stilted:

> In the alphabet recited by nineteenth-century schoolchildren, it followed Z. 'And per se and', they would say, 'and per se and'. A logogram masquerading as a letter, a letter that is also a word—like a and I and even o, but no—a letter that is only a word, the plainest word of all. A word we could do without, to be honest, if we had to. We don’t have to, and thank the language gods for that.

A logogram is only a word or phrase. How could we do without 'and'? How is 'and' the plainest word of all? This is like a bad impression of Douglas Adams or something.

I can't think of a sentence that can't be rephrased to avoid "and" (usually resulting in something that sounds less elegant, admittedly). For lists, it's helpful but optional. Sometimes you can make do with "with" instead. Compound sentences with "and" can be split up.

Many languages lack an equivalent of "and". What you do is to just juxtapose the two concepts, or perhaps you have structural redundancies in the grammar.

Honestly, we could just use commas: After some discussion back, forth; we decided to get fish, chips. Then we droned on, on about this, that.

Perfect username chef's kiss

Odd phrasing indeed. At first, the "word" appears to be "and per se and", as in an intensive of "and" But is and-squared really that plain?

> My father died, & I was still in love

Niggling editorial point: if I'm going to blow away "and", then the preceding comma is going down with it. That's just how I roll.

So I wanted to call BS on the statement that 19th century elementary school textbooks had the & character as the final letter of the alphabet, but lo and behold: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.timetoast.com/public/uploads/pho...

Now this was not universally true, but there seems to be at least some anecdotal evidence that in the mid to late 1800s some English language school age textbooks did indeed have this extra character.

That was actually really enjoyable to read! A bit of bouncy poetic prose is something I don’t see much of on HN (for good reason) but it’s fun in this context.

Tangential, since it's not what this article is about, but it's worth noting that the apostrophe acts as something of a 27th letter in English.

The problem with calling an apostrophe a letter is that in standard usage, it doesn't change how you read (prosody) or pronounce the text. Sometimes it's used in transliterating foreign words to indicate a glottal stop (an actual sound!) or as a syllable divider, but that's not really English at that point.

And when it's combined with an 's', and added to the end of a noun, it denotes that the word is plural, in modern English usage.

ASCII is so bloated that it even has a ligature from a dead language.

It’s used in English, which as far as I’m aware isn’t dead.

Opportunistically and not out of necessity, I think. As far as I know all it means is “and.”

If any word deserves a character, it’s “the.”

It’s used as a symbol in programming, I have a hard time imagining a symbol that could replace “the”. That’s not to say there isn’t one that would be suitable, I just lack the creativity or imagination to think of one.

The use in programming is also just a result of it being available. It’s a great fit for binary AND, logical AND, but there’s countless symbols that we just assign to operators because they’re available.

Prolog uses /\ and \/ for bitwise AND and OR respectively, which certainly tips a hat to one system of logic notation—of course for conjunction and disjunction between clauses it uses , (comma) and ; (semi-colon)

Perhaps, taking inspiration from Tironian shorthand, “𝈭” (a backwards version of ⁊ “et”, so to speak) would be suitable?

I believe "yͤ" is the character you desire. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles#Ye_form

I prefer the form with the þorn, but it's harder to enter on a phone keyboard. (In fact I don't know if there's any way at all to input that combining superscript "e" on my phone.)

There are a bunch of old handwritten abbreviations that have fallen out of use probably due to typewriter/computer limitations.

Þ is a long press on T, and Ð a long press on D, on my phone.

But ðis might be because I have Danish as well as English installed, at at least Ð is required for Faroese names.

Yes, but there are nuances, as mentioned in the article:

> In screenplays, two authors joined with & collaborated on the script, while two authors joined with and worked on the script at different times and may not have consulted each other at all.

I sometimes use it to avoid awkwardness in lists, e.g. "I ate fish & chips and drank a cup of tea".

I guess both examples use & as a stronger binder than and.

boots & cats and boots & cats

It's also occasionally used in English texts as a ligature for "et" in the Latin abbreviation of etcetera: &c.

Is that right.

Ampersand is really not dead - I use it quite regularly. I always sign cards from me and the wife as x & y. It is shift 7 on a en_GB keyboard

English also used to have the letter thorne. It looks quite a lot like a Y or y and leads to the notion that "Ye olde shoppe" is NOT pronounced as "the old shop". Here the the would probably have a long e so "thee". Modern thornes look more like a d - see Icelandic for example. See wikipedia for the full run down.

I still see r written as a sort of squiggly mess rotated 45 degrees. Mostly by the generation before mine (I'm 53). A lowercase s used to be written looking like f with the crossbar missing.

I suspect the kids might have said: "et per se and" or "ut ..." and then that collapsed into "and per se and" -> ampers& (yes I have seen that monstrosity used in anger)!

Þorn was Þ (lowercase þ), þhough þe usual handwriting style gradually brought þe shape closer to y.

When printing presses were imported from continental Europe, þey didn't have þis letter, so þe letter y was used as a substitute.

Eð is Ð/ð, which has ðe same sound. Ðorn derives from runes, eð from Roman script. Eð is still used in Icelandic and Faroese.

I ðink English would benefit from a few more letters, alðough ðis one isn't ðe most useful. Æ or Ø, or accents on vowels, would be more useful for spelling and pronunciation.

"Thomas" is ðe only word I can ðink of with a TH ðat wouldn't be a þorn.

I wish for once on this website that people would just harangue me for making bad jokes instead of dumping their well-actuallys.

> ASCII is so bloated that it even has a ligature from a dead language.

It was actually an english letter (at least as recently as the late 19th Century), considered part of the alphabet; its current name being a corruption of the end of the alphabet recitation including it, “... and, per se and”.

It was in fact used in old timey spelling like “Well &ctually” by the more high-brow.

We can't get rid of it now! How else would we make pointers?

Note that there are a lot of ligatures in our symbols:

- ! from “Io”

- ? From “Quo”

- W from UU (or VV, back before U and V diverged)

- And German of course has the ß, ligature of soft s with s.

There is not really a clear delineation between when a ligature becomes a letter, at least before formal systems like ASCII required them.

It’s considered a logogram now.

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