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In our discussion of English words beginning with wl- [Spotlight, Issue 138] we happened to mention a letter called yogh. This resulted in a number of letters from readers all of which can be summarized in the syllable "Wha...?". Yes, the
English alphabet was not always as we now know it. We are missing at
least three letters: thorn, edh and yogh, all of
which were present in Old English script. Unfortunately, even Old English scribes confused edh and thorn and sometimes wrote the as þe when they should have written ðe. Just to complicate matters (actually it was to save parchment), they used an abbreviation which placed the e above the þ. In some scripts, þ looked rather like a letter y so, as edh and thorn fell into disuse, this the symbol was misinterpreted as a y
with a superposed e. Later still, the letters were written
side by side and we forgot how to pronounce it. Another familiar abbreviation is the ampersand (&). Its name comes from the way English schoolchildren used to recite the alphabet: "A, per se, ah; B, per se, buh..." (that is, "A by itself is ah; B by itself is buh...") and so on up to X, Y, Z and &.. Yes, in those days the & was placed at the end of every alphabet and, naturally, when children were called upon to pronounce it they said "And, per se, and". It time these four words were run together as ampersand. The & was invented by Marcus Tirus in 63 B.C. as part of an early shorthand system called "Tirean Notes" and originated as a way to write the Latin word et (= "and") without lifting the pen. Another common way of abbreviating et looked like a letter z which is why the Latin videlicet (="namely") is abbreviated as viz., even though there is no z in the original. And this brings us neatly back to yogh which, as we shall see, ended up being written as a z.
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Last Updated 12/02/01 12:05 PM