"Now You Know Your A, B, C's," Or Do You?

One of the first songs we learn as children is the “Alphabet Song,” and even though we don’t really understand what “ellamenopee” means, most of us somehow get the sequence of twenty-six English letters down pat by the time we are ready to read. We know, of course, that our language is always changing. Think of all the new words added to our vocabulary just in the past decade. But when you are working with documents generated by previous generations or those created in countries from which your ancestors arrived in America, you may not realize how much alphabets change, and how those changes can affect your family history research.

Were there always twenty-six letters in the English alphabet? That would be no. The letter “J” is the newest to arrive, having been not considered a letter until about 500 years ago. Until 1524, the letters “i” and “j” were used interchangeably, but an Italian grammarian named Gian Giorgio Trissino, noted the distinction between the vowel “i" and the soft sound of “j” as in “jar.” Trissino’s insight was responsible for the Greek translation of Jesus’s name “Iesus,” coming from the original Hebrew “Yeshua,” to become the name we recognize today. 

 

The twenty-seventh letter of the English alphabet was actually in place well into the nineteenth century, although it wasn’t a letter at all; it was the ampersand, that familiar abbreviation for “and” that we denote by “&.” This common symbol has an interesting history. Its shape comes from Roman times when scribes wrote a cursive version of the Latin word for “and,” which is “et,” and they linked the letters together. The symbol found its way into English and was tacked onto the end of the alphabet string becoming an integral part of the whole. When children in the 1800s recited their letters, they added “and” after “z.” But that sounded strange, so they were taught to say “x, y, z, and per se and.” The Latin “per se” means “by itself,” which clarified that the symbol “&” was unique and not really a letter. Can you see where the word ampersand came from? “And per se and” mispronounced often enough evolved into the modern word, and, later in the century, the symbol, which was not a letter at all, disappeared from our alphabet.

Have you encountered “&c” in your research and wondered about why people used it? Think about the fact that the “&” really means the Latin “et” meaning “and” and, voila, you get an old-fashioned abbreviation for “etcetera” or “etc.”

Next week we will bring you the StLGS coming events for April, but the following week, we will continue our trip through the lost and missing letters from the English alphabet, so be sure to check back!

 

A Few Fascinating Articles to Read if You Want More

 

“Meet the Man Responsible for the Letter “J,” Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/e/j/

 

“What Character was Removed from the Alphabet?” Dictionary.com, https://www.dictionary.com/e/ampersand/