from the æ-þƿ-is-the-name-of-the-spy-in-my-novel dept.
Along quaint New England streets, you'll probably spot a sign or two declaring itself "Ye Olde Tavern" or "Ye Old Soda Shoppe." But before you adopt a British accent and order a pint of ale inside, there's a bit of history you should know.
Phrases like ye olde are actually just some of the late 19th century's first marketing ploys, meant to evoke a sentimental connection to older times. And ye has its own complicated story—based in the history of the alphabet.
English has always been a living language, changing and evolving with use. But before our modern alphabet was established, the language used many more characters we've since removed from our 26-letter lineup.
The six letters described in the article are: ð, þ, ƿ, ȝ, æ, and œ. Orthographic history is fun!
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Geezer on Wednesday January 18 2017, @09:28AM
I have an interest in Old English and it's Anglo-Saxon roots, and one of the first things I noticed was the use of þ where middle and modern English have substituted "Y". þ is a character based on the Thuraz rune of the Elder Futhark and the later Anglo-Saxon runes. It is pronounced "th" as in Thuraz, so "þe" becomes "the".
Because Thuraz has the pagan representation of Thunor (the A-S reflex of Thor), this like many linguistic references to pre-Christian religion were purged by the Christian zealots. It's amazing they allowed the week days to retain their references to Woden, Tiw, Thuraz, and Freya.
The evolution of languages is fascinating. It's one of the things that draws me to read Noam Chomsky's older scholarly papers.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @09:35AM
I like pancakes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by nicdoye on Wednesday January 18 2017, @09:46AM
Thorn was still in use in Middle English, and was more likely to have been removed by standardisation of alphabets in printing presses.
But you carry on with your Christianity-is-the-root-of-all-evil conspiracy theories.
I code because I can
(Score: 3, Touché) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday January 18 2017, @02:38PM
Religion is frequently used and abused for moral justification and inspiration for practically anything no matter how horrible. Slavery, wars such as the Crusades, Climate Change denial, persecution of scientists such as Galileo, patriarchal oppression of women, and income inequality. Doesn't matter how much the founder preached goodness, love, and tolerance, zealots have shown themselves willing and capable of twisting the message to suit their own selfish and evil purposes. For instance, Falwell made the ludicrous claim that 9/11 was God's punishment of America for tolerating homosexuality, abortion, and feminism.
These zealots get away with clothing themselves in moral superiority, whether of the Christian variety or some other, despite naked espousal of principles totally opposite to those of the religion they're using. What it would take to end that, I don't know, but a "better" religion seems most unlikely to help with that problem. Perhaps better education, and respect for learning? Been pushing that for centuries, with rather less than complete success, yet that seems to be the best answer we have. Perhaps evolution of homo sapiens, to further increase our intelligence?
I do agree it is not fair or helpful to hang around their necks albatrosses they didn't earn. Don't blame Jesus for what the likes of Falwell says in His name.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:17PM
and Stalin purged religious people. what's your point?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @02:33PM
...about due for another purge. Global this time? :)
(Score: 5, Touché) by driverless on Wednesday January 18 2017, @09:50AM
The six letters described in the article are: ð, þ, ƿ, ȝ, æ, and œ. Orthographic history is fun!
Or, if this were to appear on the other site:
The six letters described in the article are: ⬜, ⬜, ⬜, ⬜, ⬜, and ⬜. Unicode is hard!
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Wednesday January 18 2017, @03:39PM
The six letters described in the article are: edh, thorn, wynn, yogh, aesc, and the oe ligature (which doesn't seem to have a name that I can find, but the linked article isn't loading for me). Spelling things out is hard, though.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 1) by charon on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:46PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @06:47PM
Arthur T Knackerbracket is a bot.
The "submissions" from that source are 100 percent cut-and-paste "efforts".
Clicking on the Original Submission, [soylentnews.org] it is revealed that the oe ligature is called ethel.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:43PM
Edh, thorn, and yogh correspond to the Welsh letters dd, th, and ch. These are digraphs (needing two characters) but are regarded as letters in their own right. I'm not aware if these (and the other digraphs) ever had “monograph” letters in pre-printing press days.
(Score: 1) by Frost on Thursday January 19 2017, @09:01AM
The six letters described in the article are: Ã, þ, Æ, È, æ, and Å".
(Score: 2) by driverless on Thursday January 19 2017, @09:09AM
Yeah, it was a bit hard to figure out what to put, if I used the Unicode replacement character it would imply the site could handle Unicode, and I was too lazy to try and figure out the correct mojibake.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @10:17AM
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:06PM
I would agree. After the Norman invasion (1066) there was influx of scholars (mostly religious) from mainland Europe, who spoke mostly French and Latin. Any Englishmen educated enough to write, tried to put a French flare on it to impress the aristocracy. Hence the borrowing of so many French words into the language during this time, and the older runic characters like thorn were phased out. So there was no purge, it just wasn't cool to write in English, and when you did, you didn't want to be caught using those archaic Germanic letters. English was very much in crisis, to the point that it essentially died out as a written language for about 300 years, and it's spoken form was radically transformed.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 18 2017, @04:36PM
Yes, the initial writing system of Anglo-Saxon, to the degree they had one (most of them were illiterate), was the runes. However, that would change due to both religious Christian influence and political changes such as the Norman Conquest. You have to remember that the educated people back in the day spoke and wrote Latin, so the people tasked with writing things down would have actually been more likely to be familiar with the Latin alphabet than runes. A few runes would have stuck around for sounds that exist in English but don't in Latin, such as what we now write as "th", hence the letter þ (which is a faster-to-write modification of the Thunor rune). With the addition of the printing press with only Latin letters and a couple of Greek imports like "k" and "y" and more modern modifications like "j", it was even more imperative to drop the þ and other non-Latin letters, because each letter was a whole new set of parts you needed to make. Don't blame Christianization entirely, in other words, because the nascent printing industry has a lot of the blame.
English, like most languages, was originally written down as an approximate phonetic representation of spoken English, and even continued to do that well after the Latin alphabet was adopted (for example, "complete" might get written "compleat" and nobody would complain). While the Latin alphabet represented the phonemes in Latin really really well, it didn't do so good a job of representing the phonemes in English, and as English pronunciation has shifted over time pedants have demanded we keep the spelling the same, which is why we get really confusingly-spelled words like "knight" and "through" and "enough". That, along with the insistence of some English grammar teachers to try to apply Latin grammatical concepts to English, makes the lives of 6-year-olds miserable everywhere that English is taught.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:15PM
If you haven't already found it, you may be interested in The History of English Podcast [historyofenglishpodcast.com]. It is a fascinating walk through the history of the language. Extremely well done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @12:03AM
Podcasts have been around long enough to have written a history on them? And just English ones at that?
(Score: 1) by islisis on Wednesday January 18 2017, @09:43AM
What history taketh history can giveth back... at least as a input gesture. By making use of thumb keys and/or typing scripts, it is possible to intuitively use a keyboard layout which assigns "th" to a single key. In fact, I have freed up two keys for this purpose, but rather than any of the other "lost letters" I have found "th" and "in" to be more common digraphs (http://www.math.cornell.edu/~mec/2003-2004/cryptography/subs/digraphs.html)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @10:09AM
I know where the letters Æ and Ø went, eheheh. Danes took 'em. And they still use them. No, you can't have them back. :P
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:50PM
We had to say dickity because the Kaiser had stolen our word for twenty.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 5, Informative) by martyb on Wednesday January 18 2017, @12:38PM
Mark Twain masterfully addressed the logical continuation of this process in his usual, inimitable form:
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 18 2017, @12:42PM
Thanks for the interesting article. Those were mostly new to me.
Esset, ß, the German double 's,' was used in early English too, wasn't it?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Wednesday January 18 2017, @01:35PM
I don't think so; I think you mean either the really uncommon ancient letter yogh (U+021D, ȝ) [wikipedia.org] or more probably the long s [wikipedia.org] that looks like an f : U+017F, ſ , and you can still find that one in books only 1-200 years old.
It's quite difficult to get uſed to reading texts wiþ ðose long eſſes, I find.
Maybe you just invented the Lovecraftian ligature sgh, though :-)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @03:23PM
I assume based on its appearance in some typefaces that the German ß was originally simply a ligature of a long s followed by a regular s. It therefore seems possible that English-language typesetters may have used a similar ligature in the past.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 18 2017, @05:06PM
You're right. I half-remembered seeing it in the Declaration of Independence and other documents of the period and thought of it as ß.
Either way there's a seventh letter to add to obsolete English orthography.
I wonder if we'll ever see OMG or BFF or the like become ligatures the way et became &.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @07:07PM
If you look at handwritten American stuff from the 18th Century (e.g. The Declaration of Independence), you'll see that the style of the day had a double s written as a thing that looks like an exagerated lowercase f followed by a normal s.
If I'm remembering correctly, it was "Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America Volume One" that poked fun at this when Thomas Jefferson was involved in a dialog.
So, English speakers didn't keep the German thing intact, but did their own version.
It seems that that went out with powdered wigs.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 20 2017, @02:31AM
That's actually a long s and s ligature (weird, I know).
(Score: 2) by scruffybeard on Wednesday January 18 2017, @01:54PM
The 'Y' in Ye represents the letter thorn (þ). European printing presses didn't have the thorn character, and 'Y' was substituted since is resembled thorn. See the etymology of ye [merriam-webster.com] (second usage) in Websters. There is also more history here [dictionary.com] and here [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 18 2017, @09:45PM
Yup, and contrary to popular believe "ye" is pronounced "the" not "yee."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @03:15AM
When I was in first grade back in 1965, my very elderly teacher taught us the vowels were A E I O U, sometimes Y and sometimes W.
I never forgot that. Even though she never gave us any examples of words using W as a vowel.
In college, after an argument with an english prof, I did some research and found three words -- one of which is in a chapter title in Darwin's Origin of Species book.
Today I can only remember two of the words. They are:
CRWTH -- a type fo harp-like musical instrument
CWM -- a bowl-shaped valley. This one is in Darwin's book.
Can anyone enlighten me to any others? There must be more.
(Score: 1) by charon on Thursday January 19 2017, @03:31AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @03:48AM
Makes sense to me that w is pronounced as a doubled u.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Saturday January 21 2017, @01:22PM
'W' is a vowel in the Welsh language. For example, "bwrw glaw" (pr. boo-roo glow, with the last syllable pronounced as the 'ou' in 'ouch') means 'rain' (first DDG hit showed it to be "pouring with rain", with 'glaw' being 'rain'. I don't know enough of the language to confirm or deny that). You also see it in place names, e.g. Clywd; pronunciation of that I've heard as "clue-id" and "kloid" and as the majority of Brits speak English, the former tends to get more use.
Weird? Compared to English, yes. Look at it as more a relative to French and it makes a little(!) more sense, e.g. 'pont' means 'bridge' in both Welsh and French, albeit with different pronunciations ('Pontnewydd' is 'Newport').
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2017, @07:10AM
Here's another one for you: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Crynwr [wiktionary.org]