It's also the only letter to not have the sound it makes in its name back in ancient times, w's predecessor (which actually looked like a Y) was called Wau, and honestly I think we should bring the name back
i personally like having thorn and eth both. a way to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives would be cool, in my opinion. a lot of people talk about english spelling reforms but they're always too large of a difference. a spelling reform would have to be minor enough that those who spell things using the spelling reform to understand pre spelling reform writing. i think that a small spelling reform we could do could be using the same principles as thorn and eth, but not actually bringing the letters back. the voiceless dental fricative should still stay TH, but the voiced could become DH. dhat doesn't change things too much, right?
This is why I suggest spelling all /k/ sounds with K karakter, Pacifik Ocean, Irak, kan, kloud, ... double-k can still be ck, like klock, back, ... and the /kw/ sound kan also remain as qu, like question, queen. It's a simple reform, words are still rekognisable, but there will no loner be a C or Ch that makes a /k/ sound.
except for the fact that eth never contrasted with thorn in what sounds they represented. both letters were used interchangably until both got dropped and were replaced with the th digraph.
"&" was probably dropped from the alphabet because unlike most other letters on this list, you can't use it in words. You can use it to _represent_ one specific word, but you can't actually use it _in_ words. Fun fact: the ampersand is a corruption of "et", the Latin word for "and", and in some fonts, it does kind of look like a capital E and lowercase t smushed together.
Þis video has informed me in so many ways. Fr, imaginiŋ trying to use these in ye modern day is pretty surreal & it gets me imagining. It must have been an æon since anyone probably have ðhought to use þhese. Þis video is amazing!
The German ß ("Eszett") is a different letter. German once had the "long s" as well and it disappeared for pretty much the same reasons as in English, if much later (only in the 1st half of the 20th century).
Could you please talk about the letter "a"? The letter "a" that we use in our keypads is not the same as we use when we write on papers. Thanks a lot. Very useful video.
In Russian, there is also a letter that looks exactly like the number 3. It makes the sound “z”. There is just a slight difference between them though. З 3. The first one is the letter, and the second one is the number.
Blame the industrial revolution. “Þ” goes back all the way to the Elder Futhark “ᚦ” rune. English evolved with that sound built-in, so I wish we still had a letter for it.
Chapter suggestions, because this is exactly the kind of video for which it doesn't make sense in the slightest to not have them: 0:00 - Intro 1:14 - ʃ (Long S) 2:27 - & (Ampersand) 3:15 - Þþ (Thorn) 4:11 - That [This one appears to not have any Unicode symbol] 4:33 - Ðð (Eth) 5:07 - Ææ (Ash) 5:42 - Œœ (Ethel) 6:10 - Ƿƿ (Wynn) 7:00 - Ȝȝ (Yogh) 7:37 - Ŋŋ (Eng) 8:24 - Outro
It's a joke, and the 123 us a reference to the alphabet song past Z, because they fill up space, because other language use other letters, the numbers fill up empty space
I remember as a kid I used to take "W, X, Y & Z" literally and I actually thought "&" came after Y and before Z. It's funny to know that I was actually close to right lmao
I legit want Thorn and Wynn to come back. The three syllable Dou-ble U can be a tad large, especially when saying WWW when World Wide Web is three times more convenient when it comes to syllable count. And TH is just absurd, really. Two whole letters used to make one sound?! This is outrageous! English sucks, too bad it’s my first language and I don’t know any other ones well!
I knew a girl named Aeden and she told me that her name was illegal because it was actually spelled Æden and that letter can’t be used on a birth certificate
I think the letters X and V are rarely used in Indonesia. X is often replaced with KS V sounds almost the same as F. Taxi -- Taksi Aktivitas -- Aktifitas (Activity) Even at the age of 17, I still don't know which one is right between AktiVitas & AktiFitas. Even autocorrect thinks both of them are correct. Lol
I know this is a 7 month old comment, but what's the point for Q? It's only most commonly used in the word "Quran", I haven't seen it in any other words. It's almost like they just added Q in the alphabet to make the Indonesian Alphabet more similar to the Latin Alphabet
Actually œ is still used in french, like in sœur, cœur, fœtus, etc. But it's not a letter of the alphabet, just the way to write it, even though I think soeur, coeur and foetus are equally accepted
Fun fact: When Arabs started using latin keyboards, many of the sounds from Arabic were not possible with the limited latin alphabet, so they started using the digits.
@@Thenormalguy101here in lebanon we use ع=3 غ=gh both use h since you can usually guess from context and not many words that differ only because of these lettersهand ح خ=kh And ط andظ use t and th respectively for the same reason as ه andح In addition the ء=2
@@circumplex9552 Not necessarily, "you" and "thou" were always separate ("you" was meant for formal greetings and such while "thou" was informal) but the shift from thorn to "y" made it a little bit harder to differentiate between the two so people just stopped caring about the difference, which is why we only have one second person pronoun in English.
In Germany we still have these letters in addition to the 26 alphabet letters like the sharp s "ẞ", Ä, Ö and Ü Ä, Ö and Ü are basically an in between of Ae, Oe and Ue.
What sort of keyboards are used in Iceland? Do they include keys for these letters, which I don't know how to write on the mobile phone I am using to write this?
@@legalvampire8136 No, the Icelandic keyboard basically just combines two keys to make these letters Á É Í Ó Ú Ý But there are some that are just for one key Ð Þ Æ Ö On a mobile phone keyboard, you have to hold in the letter A to type in the letters Á or Æ, E for the letter É and etc. For Þ, you have to hold in T, for Ð you hold in D and for Ö you hold in O
One lil’ extra about ampersand. I’ve made up a tiny lil’ rule when it comes to the full-word wannabe. Basically, you’d use ampersnad whenever you use more than one “and” in a sentence with ampersand being used for every “and after the first one, or if an “and” is used in the name of a tv show or a business or something like that. An example would be Tom *&* Jerry.
I went searching for a video like this because I wanted to know where Xi went lol, got no answer but still worth it is the long s related to the eszett? They seem similar in usage what exactly does "and per se and" mean. Like are they saying something like "x, y, z, and, like the letter and" as in to clarify that they mean to end the sentence with "and" by saying referring to and "itself"? Thats really interesting that it was considered a letter. Did they have the other common language symbols back then like pound and at? Math and money symbols notwithstanding Lol I love that the spoken "ye old" is just a misinterpretation. Why did they choose "ye" to replace "þ"? Why not like "lp" or something thats more reminiscent of the thing theyre replacing? Wynn looks too much like something between D and P it's really not a clear symbol to jam into the language. I'm all for adopting stupid anachronistic charactersets just because I can, but that is one I will sadly be leaving out lol lol if you try to pronounce the "gh" in daughter it basically just turns into the german "Tochter". I would like to see that weird 3 come back too, but it needs a new symbol and name. I think that sound is still alive in Bach, because its a name
Long s is indeed related to the eszett; in fact eszett was created from a ligature of long s with short s (or z in some cases) Pretty much, yes, along the lines of "x, y, z, and "and" itself" They chose y to replace þ because by that point þ had changed its shape somewhat and lost its ascender, so it legitimately looked a lot like the y. The modern þ is based on the Icelandic iteration of the letter Wynn was ripped from the old Runic alphabet much like þ was, but it clearly hadn't lasted as long as the letter combo that would ultimately become W. And as cool as wynn looks, it's harder to parse, harder to type, and incredibly redundant Yogh stood for a significantly bigger number of sounds than just the gh, often used instead of y at the beginning of syllables and even occasionally for w within a word. And no, the sound is pretty much dead in standard English; note that Austin simply could not pronounce it, instead pronouncing it as a hard k.
@MoolsDogTwo Uppercase ß doesn’t exist in the German alphabet since there is no use for it. The uppercase ß you posted here is just there to complete the Unicode font but is not in use anywhere.
Yeah, a lot of my schoolwork was done on computers when I took French and we had no easy way of using “œ”. My teachers knew that, but I always found it ever-so-slightly annoying
@@landonrichards4434 Basically everyone just write it "oe" and computers correct it back to "œ" automatically, don't worry to much about it it's not important, really
6:00 turn it sideways GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD
Did you know: ß (German "eszett" or sharp S) is the combination of long "s" and normal "s" into one letter. & (ampersand) was originally a combination of the letters "et", spelling out the Latin word for "and". In the past, "&c" was a common spelling of "etc".
I like the eszett. i believe its name is a combination of "ess" and "zett." Duh. "Ess" for "S," and "zett" (or really tsett) being the German pronunciation of "zed," which is "Z." Since those are the sounds represented by "S," logically if you make a symbol for the combination of the two, you would combine the names.
Fun fact: the order of the alphabet is completely arbitrary, and yet so many things depend on the order never changing, like lists numbered with letters instead of numbers.
Actually it is not completely random. The order of the Roman alphabet is very similar to that of the Greek alphabet, and not dissimilar to that of Hebrew. The vowels are placed approximately every four letters. Remove letters added after the Romans and you have: Abcd Efgh I(jk)lmn Opqrst (u)V(wxyz) The Roman V was not the consonant we use it as today but the vowel sound "oo", so Roman V was a vowel. During the Dark Ages or Middle Ages people began to round the shape of the V when writing quickly, and eventually decided to treat rounded U and angular V as two different letters with two different sounds. They gave the vowel sound "oo" to U and made the angular V a consonant. Possibly the reason why the last vowel, V, was placed at the end of the alphabet instead of 4 letters after O is that people felt it was satisfying to have one vowel at the beginning (A) and one at the end (V); but I'm only speculating there. And as to who decided to arrange the vowels like that, and where to put the other letters, and how this very brainy person managed to get other people to agree with this order, I'm at a loss to know. Hebrew already had an alphabetical order in about 1000 BC when someone wrote Psalm 119, which works through the Hebrew alphabet letter by letter (you will see what I mean if you look it up - it's easier to see than to describe it here). The Greeks also had the concept that alpha was their first letter and omega the last (both of them vowels, interestingly), as we know from the fact that Jesus called himself "the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the ending" in Revelation 1:8.
yeah C's pretty useless, there's no sound it "makes" that isn't taken by other letters by default the only thing it has "unique" is "Ch" for a unique sound...but it's a combo. Could easily be its own letter.
Father-son-conversation between Elon Musk and his son: "Son, if your classmates are making fun of your name, it's not because your name is weird, it's just because your classmates are not smart enough."
last I heard, he could not register the birth certificate with letters outside of the 26 or use numbers unless it is an ordinal such as II, III, IV,... for a family name
As a teacher of grades one and two, trying to teach kids to read, having a single letter for a sound rather than various combinations would be MUCH easier! I think English has terrible spelling. I would love to revamp it and make it totally simple like Spanish. It wouldn't be very practical now though as if it were like that then people with different accents would spell words entirely differently. Ah well.... If it had been done in the first place we probably wouldn't have all these different accents because the way things are written would tell us how to say them.
I agree. A more phonetic spelling system would make it so much easier for English-speaking children to learn to read and write. Italian children learn to read and write in much less time - less than a year, I think I've heard - compared to English-speaking children because Italian is pronounced almost exactly as it is written, and written almost exactly as it is pronounced. Likewise with other phonetically-written languages including Finnish, and probably even languages that are semi-phonetically written like French. But as you also say, it is probably now far too late to reform our spelling, and the vast geographical spread of its speakers around the world has introduced so many different accents that it would be a fool's game to try to decide which accent to represent phonetically in which word.
I have seen a couple articles that some orthographers & lexicographers want to add the schwa ǝ as the 27th letter of the American English alphabet, as it is one of the most common vowel sounds in the USA ....
I would like to bring back Þ because he looked nothing like Y, Þ and Y both don't match to each other, so let's all champion ourselves for Þ. and he's also the first forgotten letter that I ever saw in a random video about him... he's my legend...
Þ is probably the easiest one to bring back really but it'd be hard teaching people to tell it's lower and upercase versions apart Þ þ i mean the lower case looks bigger to boot
