So English looks like this. But we could
have ended up with this. Over the years, English has had more than the 26 letters that
make up our current alphabet. This video is about nine of those letters that we've lost along the
way, from the thrifty and handy to the kind of confusing. For example, find out why that is not
pronounced "yee". I reckon some of these might be due a comeback. Let me know in the comments
which ones you think are worth resurrecting. First up: thorn. Now this is a really, really old
one. It's an old runic letter that made its way into English and stayed there for centuries.
It entered English from the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet known as the futhorc. It got its
name from the names of the first six letters in the alphabet, like alphabet comes from alpha and
beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. Where our alphabet song sounds like this:
[ABC Song] The Anglo-Saxon alphabet song sounded like this: [epic FUTHORC song]
Thorn was really useful because it served the purpose that two letters served now: T and
H. It made the th sound. What led to thorn's demise was the fact that over the centuries it
started to look an awful lot like a Y. So much so that once the printing press had been invented,
European printers would actually just use a Y instead of thorn. But this wasn't really
sustainable because Y and TH don't sound anything like each other. So eventually thorn was
just replaced by the latinized TH spelling of the sound. But thorn didn't disappear quietly into
oblivion. It left behind a trail of confusion. It's the reason why in tourist traps all over
England you'll see signs that apparently say "yee oldee" on them. Except that's not a
Y, it's a thorn. That's not yee it's the. Letter number two: Eth. Now thorn wasn't the only
way of writing the th sound in Old English. There was this other fun looking letter called eth.
Or at least, we call it eth. Actually, in Old English it was known as "that" and it could be
used as shorthand for the word "that", which meant "that" but it's also one of several ways
of writing "the" in Old English. Confused? Watch my video about the genders in Old English.
Anyway, in Old English, eth and thorn were used interchangeably for th. Sometimes even by the
same scholar. However, beyond English those two letters have subtle differences. Thorn represents
the th sound such as you would find in the word thorn or thanks or three. Whereas eth represents
the "th" sound that you would hear in eth or this that and the other. Both thorn and eth
also still exist in Icelandic. You might have seen eth in the name of Icelandic Eurovision
Song Contest entrant Dadi Freyr. Of course, his name isn't "Dadi" though... it's Daði. The
use of eth in English ended before the use of even thorn, but ultimately both of them
were doomed and replaced by TH. Next up: Wynn. This is another letter that made it into Old
English from the futhorc, the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet. It makes the sound that today a W makes
in words like "words". It was useful to writers of Old English because that wuh sound was common, but
the Latin alphabet had no way of writing it with a single letter. They used to just put two V's or
two U's next to each other because U and V were one and the same in the Latin alphabet back then.
So for example, in the word "equus" they just used two U's. Despite its usefulness, wynn
didn't win out in the end - maybe because it looked a bit too much like a P - and we
ended up just using the double-U method of Latin or double-V as it's known in French. Next,
allow me to introduce you to ash and ethel. I'm giving you two for the price of one here
because that's exactly what the inventors of each of these letters did. First up: ash,
which is just an A and an E smooshed together. That's named after the rune that it replaced in
making this "ah" sound that you hear in the word ash and it was a mainstay of Old English. You saw
it everywhere. But it eventually died out when we just started using an A. It did have a bit of a
comeback though when we started importing words from Ancient Greek. For example, until
really recently, in fact probably still some places, you see it in words like
ether or encyclopedia. Then there's ethel, which like the dear old lady that it conjures
goes way back. It's named after the Anglo-Saxon rune that it replaced called edel and
it actually made an "oi" sound. However it simply fell out of use to be replaced by OI
and OY. But again, you might recognize it from some more recent usages. This time with Latin
import words like subpoena occasionally and diarrhoea. It's also still used in standard French
in words like soeur and oeuf: sister and egg. Now let's go from yoke to "yoch": another letter
that we've lost along the way. It really came into its own during the Middle English period,
so between the 1100s and the 1400s, where it could replace both a Y or a GH. So the "yuh" sound
and the "gh" sound, both of which you hear in its name, yogh. You can find it in Middle English
transcripts in words as different as yet and night. You've also got to bear in mind that gh has
had a lot of different ways of being pronounced down the years. You should watch my video
about the many different ways to say o-u-g-h. Yoch disappeared for a multitude of reasons.
Not least because European typists preferred the latin characters of y and gh, but also
because it started to become very difficult to tell the difference between a yoch and a
fancy Z. You know... when they draw that little tail underneath it. Incidentally, it also existed
in Scots, which isn't surprising given what it sounds like, and it's left its mark there too
because this reasonably common Scottish name isn't pronounced "menzies". It's pronounced "mingis"
because that didn't used to be a Z, it was a yoch. Next, have you ever looked at old documents
and wondered: why have they replaced half of the S's with F's? Well the fact is they
haven't. What you're looking at there is something called a "long S". It's an old
alternative to the lowercase S that we're used to today and it has disappeared because basically
who needs another way of writing a lowercase S? But it stuck around for an awfully long
time until as late as the 1800s and it was used alongside the lowercase S that we're used
to seeing today, sometimes in the same document, including on page one of the US Bill of Rights.
But it's more than passing resemblance to an f does mean that down the years it rendered
some rather elegantly written texts utterly hilarious. Because this is a family
channel, I'm not going to show you what it did to Shakespeare's "Where the bee sucks, there
suck I..." but i think you get the picture. Next up, a quick mention for a letter that I
would more than happily bring back. It's called "eng" and it was used as a replacement for the
NG at the end of words and in fact it's used in the International Phonetic Alphabet now for
that sound. However its use in English was all too brief. It was invented in the 1600s when the
fashion really was for getting rid of letters, not adding them, and it didn't make the
grade. So long... eng. Now if you think eng is efficient, check out my last letter.
It's the Tironian "Et". It was invented by a Roman called Tiro as shorthand for the Latin
word "et", which means "and". It was also used in Old English as a replacement for the word
"and", a bit like an "&" is. However, it was even more useful than an & because
it could be used to replace AND and OND, plus you could embed it in words. For
example, in the Old English word "answer". It's a bit like today sticking it in the word London or
in the word Andy. Or indeed in the word "handy"... because it's handy. I don't know why but
unfortunately it didn't win the "Battle of the Ands". It lost out to &, but it is still
occasionally used in Irish. And that's all folks. Do remember to let me know in the comments which
of those letters you'll be campaigning to bring back. Thanks a lot for watching and until next
time, do remember to like and fubfcribe. Bye.
Yat was quite intereftiŋ.
C should fuck off too. Or fuk off