The American alphabet hasn’t always been the 26 letters we know today. It has morphed and changed over the centuries.
So what was unfortunate letter number 27?
“Ampersand”
That stylize squiggly thing that means “and.”
“Hold on, Mary. Isn’t that a symbol?”
Not originally. It was a letter. But aren’t all letters really just symbols; something that represents something else?
So let’s go back to the “ampersand.” The end of the alphabet song would have gone like this . . . w, x, y, z, and per se and. This last bit after the “z” slurred together to become ampersand. The “ampersand” fell out of use and off the end of the alphabet. I have always liked it. I guess I didn’t realize most people didn’t use it. New life has been breathed into this wonderful little character with things like Twitter which limit the number of characters one can use. One character instead of three.
So what other beloved—or not so beloved—letters have we lost over time?
Let’s start with the “long s” which isn’t the same as a long vowel. It looks like this, a funky "f":
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| Person or Persons Unknown [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)] |
One might think is was in place of the lowercase “s”. Nope, we had that too. It was called the “short s”
The “long s” is a complicated fellow. It was used when a word had one “s”, but it was also used when a word had two s’s together. It came first followed by the “short s.” But only if that “s” is at the beginning or the middle of the word.
Huh?
No wonder it fell out of use, and it was mostly stylistic anyway and faded away around the beginning of the 19th century.
Moving on . . .
“Thorn” a much easier letter to understand, which looks a lot like the letter “P.”
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| Eirik1231 [Public domain] |
“Thorn” represented “th.”
You know those signs that say Ye Olde
It’s actually not “Ye” at all but “Thee.” German and Italian printers didn’t have the “Thorn” character, so they substituted the closest thing they could find—Y. Even I can see that a “Y” doesn’t much resemble the P-looking “Thorn.” But in an older script it does.
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| Public Domain |
I see the resemblance now.
An off-shoot of “Thorn” is “That.” Yep, we had a letter “That.” Apparently “that” was written so often it needed its own letter. That letter was “Thorn” with an extra line near the top.
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| Person or Persons Unknown / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) |
So this was actually “tht” for that. Hmm…
“That” caught on fairly quickly and outlived its parent “Thorn.”
Next up—“Ash”.
You might have seen this little guy. It’s an “a” and “e” smushed together.
You might have seen it in words like æther and æon
If you hold down your “a” key, a box will pop up and give you the “Ash” letter as an alternative for “a”. It’s supposed to be the sound somewhere between “a” and “e”. Whatever that is. No surprise that it fell out of use.
And moving on to “Ethel.” No, not your Aunt Ethel. Like “Ash” it is two letters smushed together. This time “o” and “e” and has to do with pronunciation.
It was used in words like subpœna or fœtus.
You can also press the “o” key and get the box with “Ethel” as a choice. “Ash” and “Ethel” are still in use in some dialects.
The letter “Yogh” is next up on our list of extinct letters.
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| Person or Persons Unknown [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)] |
“Mary, why are you showing us a three?”
It’s not. It’s “Yogh.”
Poor little guy didn’t stand a chance with the numeral 3 hanging around. “Is that a three or a ‘Yogh’?” I think it was doomed from the start.
It’s the “ch” sound you hear in Bach or Scottish loch. “Yogh” got replaced with “gh” and, apparently feeling guilty over ousting “Yogh”, it became silent in most words like though and daughter.
Next is “Wynn.”
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| Szomjasrágó at Hungarian Wikipedia [CC0] |
Last but not least, “Eng.”
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| Person or Persons Unknown / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0) |
In 1619, Alexander Gill the Elder created this letter to take the place of “ng”. This was a great theory. But alas, people chose not to use it, and it, too, fell out of use before it even became popular.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of extinct letters, but it’s enough.
What letter do you wish would make a comeback? Any favorites?
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