How Geography KILLED a Letter

english is a global language worldwide 378 million people speak it as their native language mostly from places like the uk or the united states another 400 million people use it as their secondary language think of places like india or south africa and most other english colonies where english had a history there but never fully replaced the local language on top of that another 344 million people have the ability to speak english as a foreign language think of places like china or japan where english is taught as more of a skill to better integrate people into the world of business and other endeavors in all that makes 1.1 billion english speakers worldwide and while it still has fewer native speakers than chinese and spanish in terms of total speakers english is the most popular language on the planet and has sort of become a lingua franca or the common language of the world being so well known by so many people some are surprised to learn that the english alphabet used to contain more letters and in fact one of english's most common sounds once had a letter of its own say hello to the forgotten letter of the english language thorne it kind of looks like a lowercase b and p merged together except that's not the sound it makes today in english we use the diagraph th to represent just one sound but 700 years ago we just used thorn and this was an extremely useful letter to have we use the sound all the time heck i've already used it 36 times since starting this video but more than that in middle english and even early modern english thorn was being used everywhere and there were even abbreviations using thorne to mean words like the this that and thou the word that also had its own letter at one point which was just a thorn with the strike through its ascender kinda like a t but that one was kinda short-lived so what happened to thorne surprisingly the answer has to do with geography in the year 1439 a german goldsmith by the name of johannes gutenberg created something that revolutionized information and therefore the world by assembling hand-molded metal matrices he created a fast and precise mechanism through which type could efficiently be printed and reprinted onto sheets of paper or in short he invented the first true printing press with the ability to quickly print text like books and especially bibles the transfer of ideas and information became rapid across europe it's analogous to the impacts the internet has had on our time and the changes brought on by this development deserve a video of their own but what does any of this have to do with the letter thorne or geography for that matter well i mentioned earlier that gutenberg was german and so germany was where most of the earliest printing presses were produced and operated i also mentioned that the pieces used in the press were handcrafted mostly by germans as well but later by italians also a quick look at the german alphabet and german words reveals a complete lack of any th sounds in their language in fact the modern german language is entirely devoid of the thorn sound this is why germans in english don't think they sink any good german accent which is not mine will drop the th sound in favor of a z or s sound so whereas i'd say something like the thought was to think theoretically a german would say it like ze sot fast to sink theoretically and i'm sorry to any germans watching that had to hear that but you get the idea well here's one more example we are thinking we are thinking hello this is the german coast guard we are thinking we're thinking what are you thinking about so when the english gave the germans their documents and books to print a letter kept appearing that they didn't have a piece for because it wasn't used by them but they were too smart to simply leave out the letter so the germans used what they thought was the next best letter why as they kind of looked like each other and wise weren't being used very often so confusion would be kept to a minimum that's why old signs that say ye old whatever exist it wasn't actually pronounced yi they just didn't have the right letter at the time to say v this is also where the word you comes from as it was previously thu or thou but we kept that spelling and pronunciation for some reason then later because just using y made some confusing words like imagine trying to spell the word thigh or time or worthy the th came in to help ease the confusion and that's how thorn died what's also interesting is that english is actually a germanic language closely related to modern german in fact the angles the people who eventually became the english or english are originally from the north shore of germany and a place called anglia or in german england that's right most english people are basically just germans and while they lived on mainland europe their languages were roughly similar if not exactly the same it was only once the angles migrated across the english channel due to a collapsing roman empire and more fertile lands that their language began to feature the thorns sound while it never developed among mainland germans i should note that two other groups the saxons and the jutes from roughly the same area also came over during this time these three germanic tribes merged into the anglo-saxons sorry jutes and dominated southern and eastern britain and it was only because the anglo-saxons were isolated geographically the thorn made its way into use in the first place as well as out so it could be said that geography both created and destroyed the letter thorne in english anyway in another way however geography has also preserved the letter thorne in only a single language offshoot today does thorne still exist and that's icelandic because iceland is so geographically isolated from germany and the whole printing press revolution thorne was never altered into why there so even modern icelanders will use thorne in their writings and even their computer keyboards feature the letter they also still use a very similar letter f which makes virtually the same sound which is why in english it was kind of just absorbed by thorn at some point it's the difference between the th sound of thing which icelanders would write with a thorn and this which they'd write with an f yeah i don't really hear it but perhaps to the irish who came up with f and now the x-landers there is a noticeable difference so there you have it that's how geography both created and destroyed and preserved the letter thorn so what do you think should we go back to using thorne and are there any other letters you think we should stop using let me know in the comments below if you like this video hey why not give it a big old like and subscribe while you're at it i'll be back next week with another video [Music] thanks

Channel: Atlas Pro

Views: 583,524

Keywords: Thorn, letter thorn, Geography, english, english language, Angles, Anglo-saxons, Saxons, Jutes, England, Germany, Eth, Old English, Middle English, Germans, Germanic, Gutenberg, Johannes Gutenberg, Printing, Printing Press, Iceland, thorn letter, 27th letter, 27th letter of alphabet, missing letter

Id: uS7W917ty3s

Length: 6min 21sec (381 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2018