Now You Know Your "A, B, C's," Part II

Who hasn’t seen sentimental signs for “Ye Olde Corner Shop” or “Ye Olde House on the Hill” or something similar? Or maybe you have seen the word “ye” in an old document? Are you guilty of pronouncing it as “yee”? If so, it’s because you may not know that once there was a letter called “eth” that was pronounced as “th.” It looked like a small “d” with a line through the stem. Over time, it changed shape and began to look more like our “y” does today. "Eth" is long gone from our alphabet, but it has left us with the commonly seen "ye" that looks like it should be pronounced with a “y” sound but is really “the.” This is just another example of letters that have disappeared from our alphabet. Here are some more . . . 

More Missing Letters from Old English 

Another “th” problem is caused by the now-missing letter “thorn.” This one looks like a small “p” with the “bowl” part further down the stem. "Thorn" came to be used interchangeably with "eth," although it represents a slightly harder “th,” made with just your lips and not your vocal cords, like “with” or “fifth.”

 

If you have traveled in Great Britain, you are probably somewhat familiar with what used to be the letter “ash.” You have likely seen words like “aeon” or “aeroplane” or even “encyclopaedia” and wondered why they use that “ae” combination when we don't. The answer is simply that in old English, there was a letter that combined the “ae” as one character, pronounced as a short “a” like in “cat.” We don’t have an “ash” in the alphabet any longer, but the Brits do still retain some of the spelling.

 (Chart from "Omniglot, the Online Encyclopedia of Writing Systems and Languages," https://omniglot.com/writing/oldenglish.htm)

As you can see in the chart above, those are not the only missing letters in English. There used to be a “wynn,” a “yogh,” and an “ethel.” “Wynn” looked like a “p” originally but was pronounced like a “w.” Eventually, the original shape was replaced by “uu,” a “double u,” hence, our “w.” The “yogh,” which had two shapes that resembled a “z,” changed pronunciation depending on where it was located in a word and sometimes had a “y” sound and sometimes a “w.” If it was used in the middle of a word, it created an extra syllable. We see remnants of the “ethel” in some words we have borrowed from French. Originally a combined “oe,” it would have been pronounced as “oy." It morphed into an “e” but we can still find it in the spelling of words like “hors d’oeuvre” or the British spelling of “manoeuvre.” 

 

Finally, there is the “long s” that is probably the first of the missing letters most of us discover in our American research. We see that squiggly “f,” with or without a crossbar, in strange places and think our ancestors had no sense of spelling at all. Why is "Jefe" used for "Jesse" or "moft" for "most"? There was a string of rules about when to use the “long s” as opposed to a regular “s” (called a “round s”) and they must have made spelling and writing quite a challenge for those who had to master them. The two “s’s” were dependent on where they fell in a word, whether the word was hyphenated or contained an apostrophe, or what other consonants appeared next to them. In any case, our ancestors would have known that "bleffings" were "blessings" and a "thoufand" dollars was a treasure!

The lost and missing letters dilemma is not just in English! You will encounter lost and missing letters in other alphabets, as those who agonize over old German or Russian script will be quick to point out. They have to deal with not only unusual (to us) graphic design, but letters that came and went over time. We often say that in genealogy, spelling doesn’t count, and changing alphabets is just one of many reasons why!

 

Some More Fascinating Articles to Read

 

“What Happened to the Lost Letters of the English Alphabet?” Commonplace fun Facts, 14 August 2020, https://commonplacefacts.wordpress.com/2020/08/14/what-happened-to-the-lost-letters-of-the-english-alphabet/

 

“Orthography,” https://people.umass.edu/sharris/in/gram/GrammarBook/orthography.html