LOST LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET: 9 letters we stopped using

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Yat was quite intereftiŋ.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/Tersphinct 📅︎︎ Jul 15 2022 🗫︎ replies

C should fuck off too. Or fuk off

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/YeYEah 📅︎︎ Jul 15 2022 🗫︎ replies
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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.
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Channel: RobWords
Views: 1,289,233
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Keywords: English, language, history, history of english, alphabet, thorn, ethel, that, eth, ash, yogh, rob watts, eng, ond, and, tiro, tironian et, ampersand, wynn, wyn, winn, anglo-saxon, futhorc, chanting, dadi freyr, Eurovision, learn english, language facts, Daði Freyr, Icelandic, international phonetic alphabet, phonetics, linguistics, letters we stopped using, letters we lost, lost letters of the alphabet, letters we no longer use, letters we don't use anymore, Rob Words, old english, middle english
Id: wJxKyh9e5_A
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Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)
Published: Thu Feb 04 2021
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