LOST LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET: 9 letters we stopped using
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- čas přidán 22. 05. 2024
- Thorn, eth, yogh, wynn, ash, ethel, eng, long S & the Tironian et. This video takes you on a tour of the letters we don't use anymore. It'll tell you where they came from and why they disappeared.
You are about to find out:
🖍 Why we're all pronouncing "ye" in "ye olde" wrong
🖍 How to actually pronounce Iceland Eurovision entry Daði Freyr's name
🖍 Why old documents contain lots of Fs instead of Ss
🖍 How we ended up with a letter called "double-U"
🖍 What the Anglo-Saxon version of the "ABC Song" sounded like (a bit creepy)
...and lots more.
Among these lost letters of the alphabet are some that I would gladly bring back. Let me know which you would like to resurrect in the comments.
Many of these are Old English letters. Others are letters from Middle English. Check out my other videos about the history of the English language.
Check me out on Twitter & TikTok:
/ robwordsyt
/ robwords
That wonderful Futhorc chant is here:
• Fuþorc Chant
==CHAPTERS==
0:00 Intro
0:36 Thorn (Þ þ)
2:24 Eth (Ð ð)
3:54 Wynn (Ƿ ƿ)
4:50 Ash (Æ) & Ethel (Œ)
6:24 Yogh (Ȝ ȝ)
7:48 Long S (ſ)
8:51 Eng (Ŋ ŋ)
9:23 Tironian "Et" (⁊)
10:27 Goodbye
Video by Rob Watts - Zábava
Heads up for mobile typers!
Þ: hold T, choose Þ
Æ: hold A, choose Æ
Đ: hold D, choose đ
Œ: hold O, choose œ
Bonus! For ‽, just hold (?) If youre like me, it wont come up when holding M to get ?, you have to go to the second page of characters instead.
I couldn't find the eNG one unfortunately, i hope one of you can!
Æ œ
You can do ŋ from a mobile keyboard by holding ŋ
I can’t do the t it doesn’t work I I’m sorry 😭😖😢
True d is ð
Thanks, but đ is actuallu different
The “long s” survives in the modern German letter ß, which is a double s (eg Strasse / Straße). The left hand side of the letter is a long s
Thanks for info ! Been living in Austria and Germany for over 40 years and I didn´t know that. Always remember seeing Neuschwanstein Castle for the first time whilst wondering why it was called a "SchloB" whlst thinking the ß was a B !
The difference between the ß and a double ss is that the double ss makes the previous vowel short, whereas the ß makes the previous vowel long.
@@ArturoStojanoff Thx for Info ! This naturally gives most German-speaking people and certainly most German-speaking kids a headache. The last that I heard was that the powers that be were trying to make the ß obsolete. I meanwhile fondly call the ß a "SCHLOB" with a B at the end after mis-reading Schloß Neuschwanstein.
It's a long s with a tailed z
To get ±, hold +, choose ±.
To get ‽, hold ?, choose ‽.
I once met a guy whose name was Thorn. When I suggested he spell his name using the letter, he seemed confused. Also, thank you for telling me how to pronounce Menzies.
Careful because in different parts of Scotland it's pronounced differently.
Ming-es, Men-zies and I've heard it pronounced Mint-ez in the west!
@@williamparis500 Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies, who was of Scottish heritage, was known as ‘Ming’. Now I know why. Thanks!
We had a PM named Menzies.
Guess what his detractors liked calling him?
Minge = synonym for female pubic hair.
@@williamparis500 so would Mckenzie be pronounced like mckengie?
It would be great to bring back thorn and eth to differentiate between the voiceless thorn and voiced eth forms of the interdental fricative consonant.
We already do it with the voiceless/voiced pairs like p/b, t/d, f/v and s/z.
I love how you smile while explaining the history. I can tell you love it and that’s infectious! Great teacher.
Æs a Norwegian, I'm sitting here enthralled by this video. We still use Ææ Øø Åå. ^^ Also, I had no idea that futhark came from Anglo-Saxon. Learning new things is fun. ^^ So I will contribute! The "older" way of trying these letters in Norway, I was taught, was:
Æ = AE. Ø = OE. Å = AA. ^^ Nifty!
Though I am trying to teach my friends abroad how æ, ø, and å are all sounds in the English alphabet still! Maybe I can simply link them one of your videos. ^^
Actually, Futhark came from old germanic runes that themselves split into Old Norse Runes and Old AngloSaxon Runes.
Þþ
I will bring back þ if it kills me and þat is a promise I intend to keep
God speed!
yeah, let's bring back þ! þe alphabet could have þ again!
@@rosebud6116 I've been using it þe last two days and it is so nice
@@soundsofstabbing3627
Ah þats cool
Þat I can agree. I þink it looks neat and it was very cool looking.
The "Tironian et" is still used when writing Irish or Scott's Gaelic in the more traditional uncial script. It is also why, in Europe, the number '7' typically has the crossbar through it - to distinguish it from 'and'.
Thank you for your comment, I always wondered!
ahhh, now there's a nice little factoid to add to my collection of interesting trivia. Thanks!
We, Serbs, believe that number seven has the crossbar through because we decided to reject the seventh commandment.🎉
MAYBE NOT ..........
Modern Westen numbers were mainly 'borrowed' from the Arabic scholars
In their original form the number could be deduced from counting the angles formed by the shape
Unfortunately the shapes have morphed over the years and its no longer so obvious, but imagine an 8 as two boxes or a 2 shaped like a Z and you'll start seeing the patterns
@@cenimirius I had to look it up. Thanks
I really enjoy your language discussions and have watched many of your videos. Word origins have always been fascinating to me. I was in first grade in 1963, with Sisters of Mercy in a Catholic school. The nuns taught us some interesting things. First, our vowels were "A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y and sometimes W." W occasionally had an oo sound like in ooze. (I think it may be Welsh?) They also told us rooves was plural of roof. So at Christmas there were "hooves on the rooves". Plus (plusses) they taught us that the plural of BUS is BUSSES, with 3 Ss, not BUSES. Please keep posting, Mr. Rob, and thanks!
W is indeed a vowel in Welsh, along with Y. And proper vowels too, not them part-time vowels in English.
C'est une de mes chaînes préférés. Drôle et passionnante à la fois. Continuez Rob !
I'm an ESL teacher and it's explanations such as this that give my students the rationale they need to help them grapple with spelling and pronunciation. Students from phonetic languages like to know why English looks different from the way it sounds. Thank you.
All the more reason to modernise English. China completely changed the earlier English translations of Chinese for English speakers so as to make it clearer for them, and also easier for Chinese to understand English speakers when using Chinese words. Eg. Peking to Beijing. English is way behind in upgrading spelling to reflect common parlance.
@@Bonnieham I don't know. I'm not convinced that the common usage should determine the core of a language. Where do you look for THE proper sound, hence spelling? Where do you draw the line in this reductionist world of inclusiveness that reaches for the lowest common denominator? Thumb typing exclusionary lingo and acronyms does not a language make.
I'd rather advocate for more history of a language be included in its learning. The "why" is much more interesting than leaving such a task to today's, sorry to say, idiot on the street. Just look at the ridiculous preferences the EU makes of their version of English. Did you know there's something called EU English? It's based on what continental northern European technocrats consider more understandable to them. No, thank you.
Coming from a language that does have letters for quite a few of these sounds, I always wonder what kind of idiot wrote the English alphabet
@@Run.Ran.Run1 language exists to facilitate human communication, its history although significant has not meaning if it becomes a garbled relic which doesn't serve its purpose. gatekeeping language is a frankly miserable thing to do so i hope you realise why simplifications become necessary at times
@@ingenuity23 A consistent language facilitates communication. "Gatekeeping" as you call it, is much more consistent than letting just anyone decide how to say something. As I've mentioned before, I hope the "thumb typers" in the world aren't the ones who decide to simplify language. That would simply be dumbing down.
Rob, I had NO idea the topic of your videos was something I would geek out over, but I LOVE IT! Thank you!
Just watched this video twice with my 6-year-old son who just started learning English last year! All the edutainment things you used and the puns won him over instantly! You are a brilliant educator!
Þat is a ðiŋ. Þe ðree planets aka Mercury, Venus, Earþ. Ðat is the þiŋ, eachoðer. The ash is smooþed to Æ. But what is it? Each leŧer is a Eþel. Subpœna, and Diaŗhœa. The Neþer, agh. It is the Æther in Minecraft. This is the 9 lost letterſ in the alphabet.
@@iremovedmyhandle you got the joke!
As a vocalist who uses a lot of IPA, it's so cool to see that a lot of symbols used in that were used in English way back when!
Ok
Yes! Amazing that all the symbols seem to have been used somewhere at some point. Surprising how many of them were in English!
yep
actually, the IPA was started in England so it does make some sense
@@RobWords its not really surprising as IPA was invented by euro-centric people only backin on their past, and diregarding a real international aspect in this system so most languages outside europe have to suffer to invent ad-hoc solutions cuz IPA has no means to express whats needed, and i say that INCLUDING all those diacritis... if u can it charge up with diacritics until it looks like an E̗̚x̳̓a̰̖̓ͤm̭̜̪ͬ͌ͦp̻͔̞̐̈́͐l̳͈̞̤̐ͣͨ̆e̫͖̝̞̝͒̊̃̏̐ of zalgo text and *still* it cant deliver the right features of articulation, then u know it's really _not_ .
I have to say, that old anglo-saxen alphabet song was just awesome... how about a looped or full version?
That alphabet was cool
He had a link in the vid, I'll grab it
czcams.com/video/Q5EwVS3S424/video.html
1:20
@@Skeptimystic awesome
What a great channel. Thank you for your dedication and passion you put in your videos. It is great to learn more about English
So happy that your channel popped up! I love it. You've got me hooked! Thank you so much
There's the Ash (Æ æ),
There's the Edh (Ð ð),
There's the Ethel (Œ œ) and the Thorn (Þ þ),
There's the Wynn (Ƿ ƿ) and the Yogh (Ȝ ȝ),
All of these are no more,
There was also Ampersand (&),
But that's still around
Music to my ears. Bravo 👏👏👏
How do I type ampersand-
I found þorn!
@@heavenlydusk it's a very common symbol, if you use a standard PC keyboard you type it through shift+7, if you have a different keyboard I can't remember on the spot right now
@@Donut-Eater oh okay, I'll try to type it :')
We need to bring back Þ. It's Þe best letter ever made
@JOSHUA BEYER I þink we should
@@user-op6bx6mw9h it would go between h and i
“Ðe” is “the”
A B C D E F G Þ H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y & Z
And it looks like 😛.
Just found your channel. Love it! I've always been fascinated by English and your channel is priceless
Æ is still commonly used in Norway, we have two written languages (technically three) and it's quite often used in the second of them. Even lore is it used when we write dialects informally to one another over text as it's one of many ways of writing "I"
We also use Æ in Danish 🙂
As a child in the nineteen-sixties, I noticed on old pub signs that there were two types of what I thought to be Y, one with tail going left, the other with the tail going right. Years later, I learnt about thorn but the old pub signs had all been replaced, leaving me to doubt my memory. The signs I remember had probably been written fifty years earlier by sign-writers educated in 1900 who were aware of the old ways. Upon moving to Reading, I found the George Hotel in King Street, the frontage of which bears the ancient but nicely renovated 'Ye George MDVI', the first letter clearly being thorn with the tail bending towards the right.
OK, Boomer!
@@Perririri Your point being? Go take your meds, you're embarrassing yourself
I'm not an English speaker, but I always wondered why it was Ye Old when Y and TH were nowhere near in appearance or pronunciation. Now I know!
I didn't know that I was mispronouncing those signs. Glad to know what "ye" really is
Thank you for filling in those obvious holes. I was born in Germany and came to America at age ten with no clue of American English. I learned fast and had to dump the accent in a hurry just to fit in. In high school I chose a language major and became a Latin scholar. Curiously that led me to become a high school art teacher for 35 years and a teacher teacher for five more after that. That also included 24 years of night school or adult education. Latin was so a part of me that I used every opportunity to include Latin word origins in my lesson both for the kids, adults and colleagues. I had 40 great years of passing on my my modest knowledge. I wish you had been around to enhance my etymology. I love your presentations. They give me great pleasure.
You mean "Þhank you for filling in þhose obvious holes"! 😄(Sorry...I couldn't resist!)
Oh darn, would have loved to be one of your students.
@@RalphBellairsthhank thhose
I love your posts. Very witty and extremely interesting. Keep up the good work
This is my favorite newly discovered channel of the month - maybe year ;-) Well done, chap.
Oh my god I audibly gasped when I realized "that" and "thanks" make different "th" sounds
oh SHIT
How tf you didn't know it?
OMGG SAME I NEVER THOUGHT ABOUT THAT-
@@thanhtruong946 its just something most native speakers don't think about, because of how writing shapes our perception of language. Also the fact that there are pretty much no words in English where we carefully distinguish between the sounds (eg. þat and ðat aren't outright different words, just a natural sounding pronunciation and a weird one) means that it ends up being left to an unconscious accent quirk more than an overt difference in words.
Another example of this kind of "native obviousness" is how most of us don't notice that the P in "poke" and the P in "spoke" are different. There's a puff of air when you say poke but not when you say spoke. Try saying "as poke" and then say "a spoke" and notice how the P sounds different in each even though we expect that these should sound identical.
i think “that” you put your tongue on your top teeth only. in thanks, you but it between top and bottom teeth making it clearer and stretched out... or im just wrong idk this is my guess
For most of these, the replacements we have are perfectly fine and there’s no reason to go back. W works. & as well as simply “and”/“ond” works. But English orthography has no current way to distinguish between a voiced and voiceless “th”, so either “eth” or “thorn” or both would be a great thing to bring back.
Meanwhile we have redundancy in the form of the "x", which can be replaced by "ks", and the troika of "c", "k", and "s", of which we need only two. And then there's "y", which in French is the "Greek e", which could arguably be eliminated.
@@goodmaro The US tried to 'phoneticise' English ... and just look at the result :/
Ya, ðat's like not differentiatiŋ between "F" and "V", "S" and "Z", "SH" (where'z its letter? Use Russian "Ш"?) and "J" (as in fusion).
English could use dh and th to distinguish voiced and unvoiced, much like Icelandic uses ð and þ. Honestly, dh is a nicer looking digraph than th.
@@andeve3 I think I might have a problem aDHering to that.
I absolutely love your vids. Really informative and presented with the right balance between fun and fact. Thank you.
Rob, Du bist fantastisch! Ihr Angelsachsen könnt sowas am besten. Keep on truckin`!
I first met þ in Tolkien, who used it in an obscure backstory part of LotR in the story "The Shibboleth of Fëanor", which tells a tale about how the Elves would change language unilaterally, so when a new pronunciation fashion took off, everyone changed everything that fashion applied to. The thing is, when a new fashion to change þ to s happened, Míriel Þerindë, the Ñoldor queen, was getting her name pronounced as Serindë and was offended by it, saying it *wasn't* her name! Even after her landmark death, her son Fëanor (very much a mother's boy) persisted in using the þ sound, as did his sons, and I presume his loyalist followers. If you know the background of "Shibboleth", it is from a Biblically-adjacent story where it is used as a test of whether someone was hebrew or not, because the other languages around them struggled with the sh's and th's. So I am guessing Tolkien's intent was that Fëanorian Quenya had this quirk that set it apart because their prince was honouring the memory of his beloved mother.
AND ÐO NŒT GET ME STARTED ON 8:47
Correction on the Shibboleth reference: in the story (the book of Judges) the shibboleth incident involves the tribes of Israel quarreling with each other. Several of the Israelite tribes (Reuben, Gad, etc.) were living in Gilead. The Ephraimites, who were the descendants of Joseph's son named Ephraim, had a petty beef with the Gildeadites. They went to Gilead to pick a fight. The Gildeadites finished it. Then they sussed out the Ephraimites in their midst by demanding they speak the word "shibboleth" when captured. The Ephraimites pronounced it "sibboleth," and were apparently the only Israelite tribe who did.
I haven't read the Silmarillion yet, but your description suggests all of the characters in this scenario are elves. But one group purposely set themselves apart from their fellow elves. The comparison tracks.
IIRC, the story in the book of Judges is also the origin of the "Shibboleth authentication" message you sometimes see displayed on a webpage after logging in to your account, while waiting for the page to load
Christopher Tolkien, not the real one so it doesn't count.
Tolkien pronounced Mordor "Morðor."
Thorn is definitely a useful letter that should make a come back. Some of these letters would definitely help especially when trying to teach English and to learn some of the other more complex languages in the world.
I prefer Eth and Theta as the way to tell apart the two TH sounds. Although, I think eth could use a better name, where it is easier to pronounce the consonant of its name, in a way that reflects the sound of the th in this.
@@carultch eth literally just sounds like f tbh
@@luckyperga the th and f sound make distinct sounds in my mind, like how I can hear the difference between eth and th even though they sound very similar. Just like how a Hindi speaking people can hear the difference between a and aa even though in Western languages they don't sound different. It's just about what you grew up with.
Although, one problem.
þorn
porn
@@raulkyamko6825 If you grew up your whole life knowing that þorn was pronounced as thorn, you wouldn't mistake it for porn.
Just as you don't mistake born for porn. Yet if you speak Finnish as a first language, you'd probably have a lot of trouble with this particular example, since b and p to them sound identical. Good luck trying to say crab cakes, as it would sound like "crap cakes".
THANK YOU! thank you for covering the whole "thorn is not a y, its not ye old pub" thing..... im always telling this to people, but no one ever cares.
I am loving thorn and eth. I would gladly welcome half of them back. Keep up the good work!
Definitely bring back thorn, eth and eng. Seems way more efficient to have a single letter to denote a single sound instead of two letter combos.
I don't think you need both Eth and Thorn - although we still do make a distinction in our pronunciation of the voiced and voiceless 'th' variant, I can't think of any word pairs that are distinguished just by these two sounds ? This may have happened after Eth was lost - maybe it was replaced by Thorn which was then replaced by 'th'. I'd be happy to just have Thorn and Eng.
I've done a bit more research - we need both Thorn and Eth: thigh:thy, ether:either, teeth:teethe. See: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9F%A8th%E2%9F%A9#:~:text=In%20English%2C%20the%20digraph%20%E2%9F%A8th,%2Ft%CE%B8%2F%20(eighth).
Just learn the Shavian alphabet for English :) wayy more efficient
have you heard about CHINESE?
There are so many two letter combos, that your plan would become unwieldy.
You forget to mention that the long S "ʃ " was mainly used because quill and ink, or printing presses of the time would often turn two small "ss" into a blob of ink. So, the letter was necessary, as it separated the ink as "sʃ". As pens and printing presʃes evolved, its usage was no longer needed, and was eliminated simply because it was no longer necesʃary. By the way it was only used as a lower-case, and only if it followed another "s". And, it often had no crosʃ through it like and "f", so the distinction was easy enough to understand.
Oh wait, so that's also why Germans have that alternate character repsesenting "ss" that looks like a beta?
@@19Szabolcs91 Right. It's a combination of both.
How do you get the long s?
Presses* necessary* cross*
@@tookiecar1 They're spelt right Just with a long s.
Thank you for explaining the history and demise of these letters which I have often run across, and always wondered about, especially the long S.
I love your videos Rob. I would love to bring some of these back. My favourites from these lost letters are: Þ, Æ, 3, and eng.
I love how Ash and Ethel make an ah and oi sound respectively, but both of them now are used in words to make the ee sound
Yeah it's odd like that isn't it. I think people somehow 'know'that informal English has very much middled pit the vowels, so when they see old timey words they overpronounce them in the way they imagine. Aether being pronounced 'eeþer' in fantasy and scifi has maybe contributed to that?
That’s probably because the Greek Pronunciation of the æ and œ Letters, is different from the Anglo-Saxon Pronunciation?
It's also interesting how Æ in words like say, Æther is (probably incorrectly, but as language evolves, is it truly incorrect?) sometimes pronounced like ay-thur ay like hey or hay
@@HimitsuYami
But its not “Hey and Hay”, it’s “Ha” and “He”, that’s why the Æ/æ Letter is often pronounced in the Latin or Greek way, instead of the Old English way . . .
Also there are just cultural shifts like nuclear to nuculer, things change a bit and we see that all the time, it’s not wrong it’s different. You can say it like eether and be correct because that’s just the way things happen. Language is a constantly changing thing
Eng is very intuitive, you can tell it was invented by squishing the letters together (n + g = ŋ). It is so intuitive that I found myself using it in university when taking notes without knowing it already existed. I also would incorporate an i into it for -ing by dotting it.
That's interesting about Eng.
Also, with what he said in the video about "Ye old" actually supposing to be "'The' old", that probably means that "Here ye, here ye" might be "Here the, here the". And that almost makes more sense because that could be translation for "Here is the speaker" or "Here I speak", since basically "Here ye, here ye" was said to get everyone's attention so he could speak
@@alvexok5523 I don't quite agree. "Hear ye" is a proper English. It is an imperative calling those present to listen.
@@joshuakurtenbach1972 Oh. I'm sure you're correct. I wasn't fully sure on what I was saying, it was an idea I had. And also, my mistake, I had a little bit of homonym confusion, you're right, it was "hear ye", not "here ye"
@@alvexok5523 I didn't even catch your mistake, the ol' brain corrected it for me haha
I have started to binge watch your videos!❤
New fav channel!!
1:10 Dude looks like he’s being held at gunpoint
Yeah
I thought it was just me who thought that
1:18 My furniture started flying
The full one is linked in the description.
Hi Rob
Thanks again for an interesting post. My son still uses Thorn when he messages his mother and me. He is interested in the Anglo Saxon and Early Medieval periods and even has his 'phone set up to use a few of these old letter especially Thorn.
Always a great and informative presentation👏👏👏
The long-s letter is still used in mathematics as the integral sign. The mathematical integral is a kind of continuous summation, so the long-s is a math abbreviation for an infinite summation. The corresponding discrete summation is signified in math formulas with a capital sigma.
That's really why the letter dropped out of common use. People got tired of being reminded they failed Calculus.
Lol
I propose using eth to refer to the differential
@@jorriffhdhtrsegg The symbol for the partial differential already looks a lot like the ð, but without the cross-stroke.
I am absolutely over the moon that I found this channel. Right up my interests. Love linguistics.
How the hell have I only just found your channel. Holy shit. Fantastic content.
I really enjoy your videos. Thank you
I'm from Hamilton in Scotland and Hamilton originally evolved from the ancient Barony of Cadzow, except Cadzow was actually CadȜow but due to the typesetting of the printing press the Ȝ was replaced with a lower case Z. Very much enjoying your videos, fascinating stuff! 👍
How do you get that3
In the Cyrillic alphabet, that "z" sound is represented by "3". To prevent confusion, the Russians write their three's with a flat top, ironically the way a fancy "z" with a tail looks in English lettering...
It looks like cursive
@@actionsub
З3
which one is the russian letter?
hint: its either 1 or 2
@@tribaounidadedonstania1
Beautiful locations. Your calm demeanor and eloquent speaking make it easy to follow along and learn. You make language fun and fascinating to learn about as an adult. Thank you for sharing your love of language.
This is very kind, thanks Nick.
I’ve watched about 5 videos on letters dropped from the English language and this is the best one in every way but primarily because of your obvious research. Two or 3 of the others explained the reasons for why some letters were dropped with an answer that seems the most obvious and/or logical to someone from this century, but one bugged me: the letter that looks like a 3, YOGH, was dropped from WORDS because people kept mistaking it for the *number* 3 (really?). Your answers for the same letters were completely different, but you explained exactly why and you showed documentation! (YOGH was replaced because it looked too much like a capital Z in some typesets.) I greatly appreciate thorough research and proof when possible. My more personal appreciation for this video is for clearly pronouncing the difference between a soft and hard "th". Every video I watched did it but only yours didn’t sound (to me, anyway) like the two were exactly the same. I liked the previous video of yours on the origin of the uppercase letters of the English alphabet so much that I clicked on this one. I liked this one so much that I subscribed.
Thanks for watching and welcome aboard!
Very cool. As a practicing Heathen, learning the Elder and Younger futharks involves a lot of these letters. Thanks for sharing your expertise!
Very fascinating history of the evolution of the letters used in English. The long "s" always fascinated me and I tried to gauge what grammatical rules it followed ie never at the end of a word not before or after an actual "f" etc, but I found out like the rest of English grammar it was never consistent, had many exceptions and changed over time and often depend on the publisher.
Thanks so much for sharing. 😉👌🏻
In German: "Round s" (the normal letter) was used at the end of words and syllables, "long s" at the start and mid of words (as long as it was not the end of a syllable too).
That's also the reason why whe have "sharp s"=ß in German: it is, for example in the word "dass" => "daſs" the use of these rules: long s in the mid, round s at the end. Later the typesetters combined it, thus the ß.
I always enjoyed a Warfteiner or two… Shame that they changed it for the lack of typographical awareness.
Almost certainly unconnected, but Greek sigma also has a variant used at the end of a word, as in Ὀδυσσεύς (Odysseus).
The elongated “s” could appear initially or medially, but in final position there was only “s”.
Yes!
During that section, it reminded me of the Greek letter sigma. There are three ways to write it: capital (Σ), lowercase (σ), and at the end of the word (ς). Frankly, I am all for bringing that back, since the long s looks so pretty to me, and I since I am already comfortable with the Greek sigma, I wouldn't struggle with there being a long s.
Correct. It was a very rare document that didn't have any final "s"s, so documents nearly always used both "ſ" and "s."
*in germany, we also had the two different "s"* (the "normal s" and the "Schluß-s", "end/final s"),
and combining the "long s" with a "s" or "z" to one single ligature, we got our "ß" (called sz)
which may be written with two ss if no ß is available (and always when swiss use words with ß).
for details, search for "scharfes s" in german wikipedia, "sharp s" in english wikipedia, or "ß" in either.
until 2017 we officially only had the seven extra letters äÄöÖüÜ and the lowercase ß (since there are no words starting with ß),
but to be able to fill out forms in "uppercase only" we finally now got an uppercase version too :-)
until then, people needed to fill out forms incorrectly, either changing ß (eg in their surnames) to SS or using lowercase ß.
unicode (uppercase since 2008): U+00DF and U+1E9E "latin small/capital letter sharp s"
I have a very beautiful letter written by my recently-widowed great-grandfather in 1890 proposing marriage to the widow of a recently-deceased friend of his. He had an elegant Spencerian hand and used the long s/short s ligature in all words with interior double esses -- Miſsouri, Tenneſsee, and (best of all) Miſsiſsippi. He was born in 1846 and would've learned to write in Arkansas in the 1850s.
Outstanding! I'm an amateur philologist (self-trained). Perusing old dictionaries or books I would often come across a character I had never seen before and, because they can't be searched for would always leave me wondering. This is excellent! Now if I can just get my tongue around the pronunciation of some of them it will be great. Thanks!
Came upon this video by complete accident. Absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much.
"Who needs another way of writing a lower case s?"
Germans: It'ß treaßon then
An eszett is used in place of a word with 2 Ss, such as in the German word for Street, Strasse, it'd instead be Straße
@@matthewbrooder9414 Actually, only if the preceeding vowel is pronounced long. Otherwise, like in Terrasse or Klasse, there's just a double s
@@imactuallyasheep how did I not learn that in the 6+ years I've studied German-
@@matthewbrooder9414 The more you know ^^
It's not really fair though because I'm native
Daði isn’t pronounced as daddy? I feel lied to and misguided.
dathi
How did you paste that letter? Ia can only accessx đ
@@sorrybjoke450 Get an england keyboard
@@sorrybjoke450 đ ð
Try making a vocalized "dth" through your nose: you will probably be close
This takes me right back to my early childhood in the early 70's when they brought the teaching method of ITA into classrooms. Mum taught me the standard alphabet prior to going to school at age 5 and I could both read and write it. Schools had introduced the ITA method of alphabet so I had to unlearn and then re-learn how to read and write the "new" alphabet from the beginning. I remember struggling with the new letters a lot which included Ethel and Ash and maybe others. After a short period of time ITA was dropped and teaching reverted back to standard alphabet. I then had to relearn a 3rd time back to standard.
This was a really interesting video! 😊
You, my fellow British linguist, deserve many more subscribers! Great job!
I really enjoyed this video. I found it by accident but took a look as I recently spent a few years working in Iceland (the country, NOT where mums go to shop!) so I'd been introduced to thorn, eth, and ash. I never did get far with my attempts to pick up Icelandic because my students all seemed to want to practice their English on a native English speaker as their exams were in English.
About the third or fourth year out there I discovered that one of my students had an Australian mother. I asked him how long she'd been there and he replied "About twenty-eight years." I then asked how good her Icelandic was. With a grin on his face he replied "It's getting there."
I've subscribed now and look forward to exploring the rest of your vids as language fascinates me. Thank you.
The Fraktur font still knows the long s. In German we used it for an s at the end of a word, so compound words were easier to read. A Wachstube (Wach-Stube) with a long s inside is a guard room, and a Wachstube (Wachs-Tube) with a short s is a tube full of wax. Regrettably, Fraktur fonts aren't used any longer.
Great to hear the old usage. Please bring back thorn - I also miss as 😊
Just found this channel, the quality of the animations feels like that of a channel with a couple ten thousand subscribers. Hopefully you will be there soon.
Thank you! Here's hoping...
The phrase “sometimes in the same document” pops up a couple of times here. The thorn and eth could both be used “in the same document” because they stood for two different sounds, the “hard” (voiceless) th and the “soft” (voiced) th. The word “the” could have different pronunciations; in Chaucerian times it was almost always pronounced hard, but the softening happened in different phonological environments, not across the board and all at once. We hear different local pronunciations of it even today: hard and soft th, but also “d” and even “t” (reduced in Yorkshire speech - “goin to t’ pub”). That’s a relic of the hard pronunciation, which also survives in Lancashire and other places in the word “tha / thi” (thou / thee) among older people.
As for the “long s,” it would always be used along with the familiar “s” in the same document because there was a rule for its use - the modern “s” was a final s, with the long s being used elsewhere. (The same is true with the letter sigma in Greek even today, with “σ” used initially and within a word, and “ς” only at the end of words. So “sas” is “σας”.)
Also some of these letters weren’t abandoned by European printers simply because they looked like other letters; it was because they didn’t have those letters at hand, so they used what they did have. Nobody in England would have been confused by the handwritten thorn or wynn or yogh, only by printed material where actual other letters had been substituted.
The best example of such variation in "t" I can think of is in "mountain", where for some it's a T like T blowing it out with the tongue by the roots of the incisors, and for others just a glottal stop. almost like belching it thru the nose. And yet nobody (?) pronounces the very similar word "maintain" with a glottal stop. But add a little to either word, like "mountainous" and "maintenance", and the contrast between the T sounds exchanges between the words! It seems to be about how easy it is to put the desired stress on the following syllable.
If I recall accurately the printers were also responsible for the ff being used as a substitute for F because they quickly ran out of the capital form. No doubt there are opinions that might debunk that.
Actually the long s was final of syllables, not of words like the Greek ς.
Great research about present day English. I bless you for your splendid noble work.
Wonderful video! I would love to see 'thorn', 'eth', and 'eng' make a comeback. And if the Gods of Language were feeling especially generous, perhaps 'long s' for good measure (I've always though it elegant looking). Cheers!
It's so sad that eth turned into "th" instead of "dh". It even looked like a "d". While reading, it'd be a lot easier to get through: "Then, three thinking thimbles were thoroughly thrown through their thirty thin things."
This is why I usually have to write my name as Thorsteinn when writing with foreign people, but as an Icelander, where Thorn is alive and well, my name is spelled Þorsteinn :) Same goes for Ð/ð which is heavily used here as well. Even sometimes both in the same word. Það var nefnilega það!
And when do you must use "Ɖ" i guess that do you use the digraphy Dh sometimes or no, I have seen that digraphy for this i guess.
excusme my english, my lenguage is spanish.
@@brayanabbelinogonzalezurbina We never use Dh in stead of Ð :) Never heard about that. We use Ð in all words spelled with that letter. The only times we write D in stead of it is in e.g. website URLs where you basically have to skip any special characters
@@ThorsteinnK Dh is the official way to represent the voiced th sound, but it makes more sense to represent it just as th since English does it.
Question: Are there clear rules for when to use Þ (thorn) and when to use ð (eth) in Icelandic? I've wondered if Þ is used for the unvoiced sound (like the "th" in "thorn" in English) and ð for the voiced sound (like the "th" in "this").
Hi RobWords. LOVE your channel. I have a few comments about the "Lost Letters" episode. As long as you're on the subject, can't we streamline the alphabet even more? For example, we don't need K. C pretty much covers everything it kan do. So what, if we have to adjust a little and spell words differently like Cilometer and Cite, but as you read that sentence, they already seemed natural! And for that matter, we don't need S either. Good old C can handle those cmall jobz with a little help from the often maligned and seldom used Z (zed, if you will)! And why do people continue to think that a Pirate's favorite letter is "R," when it's really the "C" that he loves? Additionally, since the Brits have successfully eliminated H from beginning any words so required for as long as there's been an England, I think everyone else can safely do the same. Q also seems to be on its last legs, constantly having to be supported by that little "u," especially when the u has it's own usefulness and utilitarian understatements. And while we're on it, what about the ampersand for regular "and?" Difficult to write, very old fashioned and we have + to use in its place. Me + you; Abbott + Costello, Love + One, and so on. It's a multi-use clutch player with a million little jobs to do! I'm sure other viewers have other similar suggestions as well, and I welcome them. If we could get the English alphabet down to 10 or 12 letters like Hawaiian, it would be so much more efficient in our ever-growing electronic age. I'm sure you'll agree. Thanks.
this is a damn good video... you have a new follower,,,🙂
The "ŋ" should come back. It should be used as well in german.
The "Æ" had a replacement in german with "Ä" alongside with "Ö" and "Ü".
The "ſ" was partially dropped, because it was too similar to an "f". But it kind of remained in german. In Germany we have a ligature consistin of the "ſ" (the long s) and "ʒ" (the old z). The ligature is "ß" (called sz).
If the Germans can’t type it, they can write ss, ae, oe, or ue for ß, ä, ö, or ü, but when should eng be used in German?
@@HippieVeganJewslim
For example: The word "eng" ("tight"), "mangelhaft" ("faulty"), "Richtung" ("direction"), and many more.
@@HalfEye79 Dankeschön, aber das ist nur ng in mangelhaft und Richtung, nicht wahr? Nu, vielleicht ist ng kein Weg zu sagen. Wieder danke!
@@HippieVeganJewslim
Das "ng" ist noch in vielen anderen Wörtern. Nicht in einem großem Teil der Wörter, aber, meiner Meinung nach, genug um den Buchstaben zu begründen.
Up in the North, Norwegians have Æ, Ø, Å, Swedes have Ä, Ö, Å. Now, I'm no expert, but our Å is probably how you pronounce O, our O is like your U, and our U or Y is like your Ü. I think.
The ghost of ash lives on in some spelling variations; grey in Old English was spelt with ash but as this died out neither "a" nor "e" became completely set in its place.
Love this. Great contribution as always.
Æ
British: It's spelled 'grey'!
Americans: No! It's spelled 'gray'!
Intellectuals: *græy*
The Middle English Compendium says the West Saxon dialect of Old English had grǣg and Anglian had grēg. I think this could explain the two spellings.
@@Hurlebatte yes that matches Old Frisian as well. There is an interesting almost full spread variation of the vowel in this word from -au to -i across cognates and the spelling in Middle English was especially fluid. Grizzly is another one that made it into Modern English albeit somewhat specialised.
Thorn and Eth are doubly useful as they not only save the writer a whole letter, they distinguish whether or not the "th" sound is voiced. I would also prefer a Wyn to a Double-U, but only for aesthetic reasons.
Interestingly, the ampersand is actually a highly stylized ligature of the letters "e" and "t", which is why you sometimes see "et cetera" abbreviated as "&c." so is basically the same thing as the Tironian et, but just harder to write.
I’ve written ŋ in the past by “mistake” while writiŋ , kind of likiŋ how it looked, along with its convenience. It’s satisfyiŋ to feel that it was sort of a natural outcome from writiŋ loŋ ago
I’m so happy to have found your channel!! 🤓
Writing* liking* satisfying* writing* long*
In German: "Round s" (the normal letter) was used at the end of words and syllables, "long s" at the start and mid of words (as long as it was not the end of a syllable too).
That's also the reason why whe have "sharp s"=ß in German: it is, for example in the word "dass" => "daſs" the use of these rules: long s in the mid, round s at the end. Later the typesetters combined it, thus the ß.
It still shall be used when using Fraktur or other scripts like that.
You can see the pointlessness of these things when you have to explain it to someone don't you. "An s in the beginning is different than ss at the end."
Why oh why!
My theory is that Germans aren't as rebellious as the English to shake off all the silliness. Like the ridiculous verb placements. (Let's just throw all the verbs at the end and out of order shall we?)
@@JohnSmiffer After the spelling reform, the letter "ß" has a very clear purpose in German, though. It helps differentiate words with a short vowel and with a long vowel. For example, the German words "Masse" and "Maße" are pronounced differently and mean different things.
@@allesindwillkommen It's a very narrow purpose though isn't it.
I would wager that context would provide 99.99% of the clues of what meaning you were going for in terms of actual conversation.
@@JohnSmiffer By that logic, both English and German can get rid of the letter "x", as well, since every word that has an "x" in it can be rewritten with other letters. So go ahead and start a petition to ban the letter "x".
@@allesindwillkommen I think USA has too many Meksikans to let that one pass.
I actually don't mind the ß. it even looks interesting.
I lived in Germany for a while, my main language complaint was with the general grammar. Verbs at ends, different endings for adjectives depending on gender/case. All seemed pointless to me.
This is about to explode in the recommended and get millions of views... We are the pioneers! Great video! Its crazy how letters and rules can just be forgotten or removed!
I'm sure everyone noticed that the lost letter "and" looks like the number 7 but did you notice that the ampersand on a qwert keyboard is on the same key, above the number 7, putting the lost letter "and" with the ampersand?
I so enjoy these!!
*Wait so you're telling me that æ is pronounced as "ash" and not "aye"?*
x æ a 12 (x ash a 12
>:0
it’s called ash but pronounced as “aye” like calling the letter G “jee “ but pronouncing it “guh”
I thought its the letter a-
In danish ash is pronounced like the 'e' in deck and fed.
1:00 Me: Ah, like QWERTY
Him: Like AlphaBeth
Me: Ah, yes, that might be a better example.
Did English ever have cases? A video on when it had them (if it did) and when and how it lost them would be a great video!
I'm learning Croatian, and the concept of cases is so completely foreign to native English speakers, but I understand that some modern languages that don't have them used to, and I'm fascinated to know more about it.
Traces remain in English : who # whom.
@@Serendip98 Right! I'd love to hear more about that aspect of Old English.
I used to make up letters when I wasn't sure about the use of one or the other. It's good to see someone else did it as well, even if they didn't caught on.
Æ is still used in 2 of the continental Scandinavian languages (Denmark and Norway) and in the insular languages (Icelandic and Faroese). It makes roughly the same sound as the "e" in the English word "Tent"
In Icelandic Æ is actually pronounced like the words "eye" or "I", and I'm fairly certain that the same goes for Faroese. In Icelandic we actually write Faroe Islands as Færeyjar!
@@mlo4982 Interesting! Never known how to pronounce it in Icelandic before! We also call Faroe Islands Færøerne, so I can see the resemblance between Icelandic and Danish
Bonus info: In Sweden they use Ä for the exact same sound and purpose.
Wouldnt say it resembles the "e" sound in english. It resembles the "a" sound in the word "ash" , like he said in the video.
@@khole15 It depends. Words like Æsel, Væsen, Æske all have the E sound in Tent. Other words like Ære, Pære, Lære, Sværge have a sound closer to the A in Ash. When you pronounce the Vowel on it's own tho (like when reciting the Alphabet), it is with the first mentioned vowel sound
I grew up in mainland, China and started studying English when I was just able to speak my own native language, which is Mandarin. This video reminded me the way my teachers used to teach English pronunciations when I was in primary school. They would essentially use these letters from Old English as denotation of the pronunciation of a word. I had no idea where these letters came from until I moved to Canada haha. But they did help me understand the pronunciation system in English a lot, especially for words where the same vowels would have inconsistent pronunciations across different words that use these vowels lol.
It was probably the international phonetic alphabet, or IPA
The long S has survived in an unexpected place. In the violin family, “F holes” are still, occasionally called “S” holes.
and so charming as well...I can imagine him (before CZcams) chatting up a lovely with these ffun ffacts (as in Cymraeg (Welsh in Welsh), it's the ff that gives the Saesneg(English, in Cymraeg) , and the f is pronounced as Saesneg "v".. and ending with The MidsummerÄs night Dream quote...(when he charmed her to his apartment..) ! Many thorny 7nks.
good joke 😂😂😂
FYI: We still have the oe and ae in norwegian. Oe = Ø pronounsed as the i in sir. Ae = Æ, pronounced as the a in ash.
Same with Swedish although Ö and Ä looks better imo
By the way, Danish also has both Æ and Ø.
just writing a check for tickets to Trollhsugen 50th Anniversary Lunch, a Stampede Pass lodge owned by Seattle Sons of Norway -- (the wife and I are involved with XC "Ski for Light" there)
And Å - and Iceland uses þ and đ
@@sarahgilbert8036 ð*
In Irish, the Tironian et (7) is also used in the Irish equivalent of etc. - 7rl. - short for "agus ar uile", loosely translated "and all/the rest".
Love the vids Rob - so interesting!!!
You just used seven😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Đð
Tironian et letter is to be like this (⁊)
@@Error42279 That's so hard to access that most modern Irish typists just use "7". Of course this may be a hangover from typewriters that simply didn't have the symbol at all.
@@QeedVann_Official15 Nearly impossible to do otherwise.
Yes! Þhe Þorn! We should never have gotten rid of Þat. The sound is so quintessentially an English Þing; we should have retained our unique symbol for it. Question: What was the rule (or was there one?) regarding where the long and short s's were placed? Love your videos!
new to your channel and quite like it! - I see the long s on many a gravestone here in Quincy Massachusetts
Þy videos are þe greateſt! Ƿe ſhould keep all þe letters! Greetiŋs from Vienna
Herzlichen Dank aus Berlin! Þe more letterſ, þe merrier!
#Bécs (in Hungarian)
I don't like wynn, W is better
This is really interesting and helps explain a ton about why sounds GH like in night are pronounced the way they are, or why TH can be soft or hard. Especially for a bilingual like me whose vernacular comes from the Austronesian family of languages. Interestingly enough, the modern Filipino alphabet has Ng as a single letter, and instead of calling it "Eng" we call it "Nang". The Ng along with Ñ added to the current English alphabet make ours 28 letters instead of 26.
When I first saw the "Aetna" logo (pronounced "et na"), it was spelled AEtna (where the AE was combined into an "ash" symbol), so it should have been pronounced, "at na". Also, if you were watching The Ocean Cleanup with Boyan Slat, they are using ships called the "Maersk" (pronounced "mersk" or "m'rsk"), but the ae is combined into an "ash" symbol, which makes me wonder why the name isn't pronounced, "mah-ersk".
I'm similarly confused by encyclopædia, dæmon, pædophile etc because they should all be pronounced with an "ah" sound for æ, but are now all spelt with an "e" replacing the character and being pronounced as an "ee" sound. Well, certainly in British English. The last example of "pædophile" in American English is pronounced with an "eh" sound which although sounds very wrong to Brits, I guess it is actually a closer way to how æ is supposed to be pronounced.
Having said that, differences in accents and time periods can affect how things are pronounced far more than the spelling, so perhaps dropping the "æ" character for either an "a" or an "e" to better reflect the modern day pronunciation is actually better than having yet another character with yet another set of rules on how to pronounce it generally and another set of rules for exceptions to the first set of rules! This is quite common for most characters after all - consider the different f sound in "of" or "roofs" compared to "four", the non-existent sound for the p, k or b in words like "psych", "knife" and "debt" and the many ways of pronouncing (or not) the letter c depending on the context - "arc", "arch", and "archive" as well as in "science" and "ceiling")
If I'm not completely mistaken, English had some simple rules on how to use the short s and the long s, it was not arbitrary. It was something like the children's version of (Kurrent style writing) short/long s in German, where there were some 338 very specific rules on that topic (we also wrote different "r"'s depending on the preceding letter, simply because we didn't like anyone to be able learn our language)
Basically, the long-s is only used when placed initially or medially (within) a word, whereas the short-s is used terminally (at the end of words). The short-s is also used as the second letter within a geminated (pair) of esses ("ss" is written as "ʃs"). These are the rules for English, anyway. The long-s was also used across the European continent, and may have had different usage in non-English-speaking countries.
1980s, spent a long time in Denmark.
The "Þ" sounding like "th" has transmogrified to 'd' in Danish. Hence "bad" (dk), meaning "bath"(en), pron. "bath"(dk), slightly softer "th" sound. And there are loads of words like that.
My last name is Madsen (from Denmark btw.) and english people pronounce it with a hard d, so it sounds like Mattsen, while in danish, it is a silent d but prolongs the s sound. In english it would be closer to Massen to get it correctly. It gets even weirder on the island I live on, as we have a habit of cutting the d's if at the end of a word and if short enough, like "ged" (meaning goat) the "e" disappers as well when we cut the d sound and it transforms into one word of "g" for goat lol! :D But yeah, you are correct that we have a lot of soft or silent d's in our language. Also bad has a couple of different meanings. Bath (as mentioned) past sentence of praying and past sentence of asking for something. Which it is, depends on how long or short the 'ad' sound is or the context of course.
Jeg tog et bad - "I took a bath"
Jeg bad om saltet - "I asked for the salt"
Jeg bad om bedre vejr - "I (asked) prayed for better weather"
Han bad til gud - "he prayed to god"
Bad is also (rarely) used as a short form for bathroom (Badeværelse in danish)
English people usually also gets a good laugh when they see the city sign for the danish city "Middelfart" which in danish is pronounced with soft d's, the english however...
Or back in my youth when lifts/elevators had a small warning sign light up when using it, saying "I fart" which in danish means "In motion" :)
You can blame the Hansa traders for that, and also a lack of education or perhaps arrogance of the native Norse, that didn't want to or didn't know the correct spellings of their words, so they just spelt it how ever they pronounced, which was again heavily influenced by German Hansa traders (hence 40% of Danish words aren't even Norse)
This was for some reason avoided by Icelanders and some mountain boys in Sweden though barely for them, for Icelanders they always seemed to had healthy scholars, a lot of Sagas from there despite their low population, thus their language is much better kept than their sister ones.
As for aforesaid Danish, too much beer influencing it, always mumbling about and dropping letters, barely a real language. That word's actual spelling by the way is Farth (Farþ) related to english Fare and Further. hence in Swedish I think it means race.
Sorry if you took anything I said personally, I do not mean it as such.
@@griksrik1420 Personally? Naaah, our language is a mess sometimes. Gets a good laugh out of foreigners though and a good laugh at them when trying to speak danish :D
Selvfølgelig. Old dansk og old tysk blandet med med keltisk blev til engelsk som vi kender det
This was entertaining and very well explained! I've been studying English for years and never knew these letters had existed at some point. Thanks!
Love it, thanks. Justing reading about Anglo Saxon art. I like the and pictogram tool. Might bring that back 🔙
This was always the sort of stuff I wanted to know about our language especially in English class when I was young!