The 7 Forgotten Letters of the Alphabet 

Thank you all for watching!! To try everything Brilliant has to offer-free-for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org/TheGeneralistPa... . The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.

The letters "Þþ", "Ðð" and "Ææ" (directly available on my Icelandic keyboard) are still used in modern Icelandic, as Icelandic is the closest a modern language gets to Old Norse.

Bringing back eth and thorn make the most sense. 1) it helps to differentiate 2) it helps learners of English as a second language to pronounce the language more accurately.

Æ is still very much alive in Danish. OE is now written as Ø, btw a noun in itself meaning ‘island’. The third non-standard letter is Å, used to be AA, but was changed in the 1940/50s. Å is also a noun in itself meaning ‘small stream’.

My favorite is '&'. What I've heard, and hope is true, is that this letter was taught to english school children and was listed at the very end of the alphabet after 'z'. So, when they sang their alphabet song, they ended it with 'x..y.. z... and, per se, &. Z was spoken ZED by the english and & simply called AND. When it later fell off the tail end of the alphabet (being more a complete word symbol than a letter used in making words) its name was concatenated, changing from from 'and per se AND' to ampersand. As I say, I hope this is true, because it's a cute story.

BRINGBACKTHORN!!!

Hey, native French speaker here, it appears that you have made a confusion between ash and ethel. Ash ist NOT used in French today, ethel is, like in the word œil (eye) or œuf (egg). Today, it makes mostly an [ø] sound, sometimes é, and we name this grapheme (because it's not really a letter) “e dans l'o” or “e in the o”. Great video though!!

As a history teacher this has quickly become one of my favorite channels on RU-vid, great video as always 👍🏾

In Dutch, and only Dutch, I and J combined, IJ, is considered a single character. It's only since quite recently, in the last 30-40 years or so, that not capitalizing both, if they start a sentence or proper noun, is considered correct grammar. The constant evolution of spelling and grammar is interesting.

Proud to be keeping Æ alive and well in the English language!

Ash (AE æ) is still used in British English, for example, encyclopedia/encyclopædia. There are many others, particularly in printed text.

Wikipedia says that long s (ſ), in typography, is a swashed lowercase s. this means it’s a letter with some lines being lengthened or exaggerated for style. fun fact: it is also the first half of the letter Eszett (ß) used in German. the second half of “ß” is the Ezh, aka: “tailed z” (Ʒʒ).

I guess you could have mentioned eng 'ŋ.' Not really a separate letter on the same order, but it does show up in older writings. It's just ng, but in some dialects there is a slight variation in how ng is pronounced at times. Similar to the way T can be softened or dropped.

Someone told me that the Irish alphabet had lots of other letters which got lost for the same reason, when printing presses from europe came over, and that's why irish spelling seems so odd to English speakers. I would love a video about this if possible as it would really help me understand the language of my ancestors better

Thorn, æ and œ because in many Germanic languages, like English and Dutch, tons of everyday words do use these in spoken form. I’m pretty sure they would also be useful in simplifying certain grammar/spelling rules.

The long S never died... ask a mathematician about integration and "hello, long S"

Thorn and Ash really need a comeback

Thorn has caught me out in programming when we use the Ascii character 252 to split... Unless you are careful with the specs, it will break apart any word with a 'th'.

ᚦ & ᚹ are Anglo Frisian runes (Futhorc), & are not are *not* borrowed from old Norse. Old Norse used the younger Futhark. Both sets of runes descend from the elder Futhark used for proto-Germanic (& of the two, the Futhorc has more in common with elder Futhark than younger Futhark does). Common ancestry, not borrowed

All forms of English are sorely missing /þ/ and /æ/. British English has potential use cases for all the other five. Especially if we recognise that they don't necessarily need to be used exactly how they were used in the past. For instance, they could be used to give better written representation to phonemes of regional dialects like Scouse, Geordie or Mackem.

The integral sign in Calculus is a long s; since integration is a form of continuous summation using a long s makes sense.

Wow, that is a thought-provoking video. It shows how much English has changed over the centuries, from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) to Modern English. Thank you for this eye-opening and educational video.

My 5th grade teacher, back in 1975, taught us the long “s” because he still used it 😱

You already know which letter I’d like to bring back. 😉

I wish this video had been around when I taught English grammar and spelling to accelerated learners in the 5th grade! My students had questions about this very topic and there wasn’t a lot written on the subject before the advent of the Internet. I myself was the English language nerd in school and still enjoy reading dictionaries for fun. A fascinating video! Thanks.

I felt like that was a very informative video and made a lot of sense on why we have weird sounds for weird letter combinations that we use today

I had questions a while ago about these old letters and no one would answer me. Now here is a video on these letters. I just had to wait for the answer, which took a time. Thankyou grateful.

Æ and OE (now Ø in danish) are a great way to differentiate vowels and may be easier to understand for learning speakers. The same could be said of Þ and Ð, alþough Þ might need to change shape a bit for legibility. and I personally hate the name "double-U" for W so I would like to change its name to "Wynn."

This is awesome. And I wish some of the sounds would be brought back into the language. I have three young children who are learning their letters and sounds, and my first wife was from another country and English was her second language, so it's kind of the same set of problems as with the children… English is extremely hard to learn because we don't have the letters that match all of the sounds, and we use a lot of silent sounds spelled out. It's bad enough that we have different sounds for the same set of letters, and you basically just learn how to use them. If we brought back some of the lost characters, it would actually simplify a tremendous amount of these differences. Although, sigh, I guess it doesn't really matter anymore… Our language is getting reduced to short hand text lol

I’m sad that you didn’t include any Middle English written versions of the long s, as it looks very different from the integral sign you’ve referenced here, much closer to the f it gets confused with. Another interesting diversion is the German letter ß, which is the combining of a long and a short s into one letter.

Not only do I think most/all of these should come back, but I'm also going to look for a single-letter substitute for sh, ch, and wh/hw to enhance my fantasy-writing (scroll-props for D&D, for instance).

Always been a fan of Ð/ð and Þ/þ since i first learned about them.

While ae and oe aren’t used in writing, I have a vague memory of seeing them in the pronunciation key in dictionaries when I was a child in the 70s. Looking online at Miriam Webster, it appears that oe is still used but I don’t see ae.

I'm surprised you didn't mention the use of ȝ in the Scottish surname Menȝies - now spelled as Menzies, but still pronounced as /ming-iss/ by some families, both in the UK and in Australia. Anybody doing British genealogy will likely have run across the county of Eſsex (Essex) in census records from the 1800s - presumably Suſsex (Sussex) too, but my research hasn't led me there!

"LOST" but now refound! Truly, this is a great day.

Nowadays, people know about the ʃ in the IPA, in which it makes a "sh" sound. Put a t beside it to get t͡ʃ, which makes the ch sound.

In the Civil Wat letters to his sister by the brother of an ancestor, it took me a while to figure out what was what I now know as the long "S". Once I realized that, I could transcribe the rest of his letters. The script in them is beautiful and so respectfully written.

Very cool. I'm over 60 years old and today I learned something new. I find all your videos fascinating. Keep it up and I'll keep watching.

This was great! Thank you!

Very interesting, thank you!

I’ve enjoyed this video and your video on how upper and lower case letters evolved. In this video I found the Ye=the very interesting, and how over time we got it all wrong. But to change the subject the thing I also noticed in both videos is that print style of writing seemed to be the most common style throughout history while the cursive style seemed to play second fiddle. Today there is a big brouhaha going on because some schools are considering dropping the instruction of writing cursive from their curriculum. The argument for dropping it is that because computers are prevalent in the classroom cursive has fallen by the wayside, so why teach something that is not being used. After all school budgets are being cut and there is barely enough money to teach the essentials. The argument for the continued teaching of cursive is that many historical documents are written in cursive and if student doesn’t learn cursive they would be depraved of being able to read the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the hand written letters of the founding fathers, and other historical writings. I’d like to see a video outlining the progression of print to cursive. When did cursive become prominent? Did it ever really become prominent? And your assessment on what would be lost if cursive is no longer taught in grade school. I’m 70 years old and if I remember correctly cursive was taught in the third or fourth grade and by the fifth or sixth grade all classroom writing was expected to be in cursive. The only time I use print style writing today is when I’m addressing envelopes for some strange reason.

Absolutely amazing video like always! You always know the most fascinating subjects to talk about, and I just want to let you know how much I appreciate the amount of time and effort you put towards your videos!

The reason for not having a long s before an f was because in lead letters, the long s hung a bit outside the block and having an f afterward would lead to to damaged letters. Contrary to double s, the combination was not that prominent, so it wasn't worth creating it's own block (ligature) for it. So they simply made a rule to avoid that. As for the the long s-short-s at the end of the word, that was at some point put together to one letter block. In German we still have the result, a sharp s (ß).

You just earned a new subscriber! The long s is still used extensively in mathematics as the integral sign. It represents the concept of an idealized infinite sum.

If you have to read an old printed text that has been scanned and run through an OCR, the long s will be turned into f. The OCR are generally worse than us to discriminate the two. It makes the text difficult to read and a hell to seach.

Yogh was also replaced by y at the start of words and z or s medially. Final/near final gh is silent if there is a preceding front vowel, a following front vowel now lost, or if it represents the aspirate h (final back g and h merged in OE but the difference was partially restored to conform with other cases of a word). Norman English had no þ sound, and followed Latin/French pronunciation, voiced as /d/ and ellided when unvoiced, so Mildred for earlier Mildþreþ, and Alfred for Æþelfriþ.

Love your content, thanks for posting, great vid!

Great insight

I have a number of older books (a hundred years old or a bit more) that still use ash (ae). I agree with another commentator, bring back thorn. Stop all this “ye olde tavern” stuff. Plus, these books still have umlauts, making pronunciation more obvious (as in cooperation), along with the accents left in such words as coupe and debris, also making pronunciation more obvious.

6:35 A common mistake by English speakers is to pronounce this word *Loch Ness* as Lok-ness… In Scottish this *ch* diphthong makes a “h” sound as in Hello, hi, hope… etc So, it’s jot lok ness, it’s lohhh ness, this hhh sound with the throat! In Hellenic🇬🇷 language we also have some letters that we stopped using during the centuries. And seeing this video you can see how bad was Latin for English. You have so many distinct letters for all these sounds that today are just like … “th” In Hellenic we have two separate letters for these two different sounds! We don’t understand why you’re saying voiced and unvoiced th when they are two distinct sounds. Δδ > th as in the, that, though Θθ > th as I’m thanks, thumb, think

It was so interesting. I had no idea. Thank you for explaining all of that.

Very informative! Well done.

Good video! Thank you.

I am neither fanciful nor archaic BUT I do still use ae, eo, ao, oe, diphthongs because there are many words whose spellings include them and we were taught at school that in some words - archaeology, manoeuvre, aeroplane among many others - they were ALWAYS to be spelt using diphthongs (as our teachers called them). And I didn't go to school in the UK either although two of my schools English teachers were from the UK originally. But even in exams we would be marked down if we didn't use the correct spellings, Americanisms (as they were called at school) in spellings were NOT permitted. And this was only 40 years ago now.

Bravo! While today's youth are wasting multiple hours on social media, baby boomers like myself are improving our minds viewing videos like this.

The Roman alphabet which Anglophones use was actually an adaptation of a Greek variant alphabet spoken on the island of Euboea from which colonists established settlements near Naples (Cumae) and these were some of the first Greeks the Romans came in contact with and how the word "Greek" was invented - they came from the town of Graea on that island of Euboea.

Thank You Now I Learned What Letters Are Not Used (You Just Earned An New Subscriber)

In the Scandinavian countries we are very happy with our Æ, Ø and Å. (The Swedes write them a bit differently, though). Æ makes us able to differentiate between the very different A sounds in "car" and "cat". Ø makes us able to differentiate between the very different U sounds in "uniform" and "fur". Å makes us able to differentiate between the very different O sounds in "two" and "for"

So far, just the 'eth' the D with a crossbar as it can't easily be mistaken for another letter.

Loved it 😊

Fascinating

I believe that each vowel in the English albpebet(Roman) makes five sounds. Any idea on a symbol for each of those sounds so as to make pronunciation and spelling easier?

My daughter Isabella and I are both advocating for the return of the letters “Ethel”, “Ash”, “Yogh”, “Wynn”, and of course, “Thorn”. We, along with the rest of our family, yearn for the day that they all make a comeback.

Excellent

The thing about þ vs ð is that before modern english they did not need to be distinguished since unvoiced was only at the beginning of words

I still throw an ash and eth in occasionally to keep readers sharp (ash is particularly steampunky IMHO), but thorn is definitely in for a revival.

"Encyclopædia" still uses the letter æ in British English. Sometimes written as Encyclopaedia. Americans write it as "Encyclopedia". Also found in words like pædiatrician. Alternate British, and American spellings follow the same pattern. The letter œthel is found in words like diarrhœa. Alternate British English spelling is diarrhoea, and American spelling is diarrhea. The one American exception to this rule is phœnix which is spelt as phoenix in American English.

Thank you that was very helpful. I would, however, point out that you pronounced the Scottish "ch" wrong. When you gave the example of Loch, it sounded like Lock. Where the ck gives a hard c or k sound. Scottish Ch sound is more open with softer sounds from further back. Otherwise a very well done presentation on forgotten letters.

We MUST bring back all of the Letters!

Lewis Carrol used the middle english switch to early modern to hide puns as J and I were interchangeable. "You cannot have jam today, you can only have iam tomorrow or yesterday". Iam in latin is "Now". Descarte's "I think therefore I am" may've had a pun hidden. I think therefore jam makes no sense but "I think therefore iam" or now makes sense. Homer had Odysseus, in his cave Odyssey, tell Polyphemus his name was Outis, which in Greek is "no one". When Polyphemus was being attacked and yelled for help- "Help! No one is attacking me!" his cries fell on deaf ears.

Both me & my 13-year old daughter Isabella have this motto: “Bring Back Þorn!” which means that we both are activists for bringing back the letter þ (thorn).

I now understand the humor in an old cartoon where it mentioned "the purfuit of happinefs" -- those aren't a "f" at all!

I actually saw some of these letter before. Learning English as a second language, I saw eth as part of the phonetic alphabet, denotes the voiced dental fricative, and French still uses ethel. I have also seen ash in old Latin words carved onto stone. And as a mathematician, it's funny how long S has been repurposed as the integration symbol.

Dad said when you saw æ, your mouth should form an A but say E, and when you saw œ you for an O but say E. Explaining stuff about Danish.

Very interesting

I think I just saw why the German eszett looks the way it does... they just stacked the short form of the letter on the same staff like a modern bindrune.

My Grandfather's name was Alford, but everyone wrote it with an ash AElford. His Dad came from Cornwall, then went back to Ireland. The family history is sort of twisted up. AElford died when I was 11.

Æ is very much alive in English for some of us: Archaeology, Mediaeval, Anaesthesia, Encyclopaedia, Faeces - just a few off the top of me head.

English is everybody’s second language and it shows.

Ðis video ƿaſ væry ȝood and helpful Þanks!

One of the letters (or sounds really) that we sing in our church choir often is the "schwa", or a "eh" sound. It is usually written as an upside lowercase e Oh, and since Old English is really a Germatic language, the "long S" in German is known as the "esset", and it is used in place of a double S -- like in the word "Congress" in the Constitution for example.

I think we should bring back a few of these. Thorn, Eth, Ash and Ethel specifically. Thorn and Eth, because it makes it easier to differentiate between the voiced and unvoiced sound as you mentioned. Ash and Ethel along with new symbols to represent all of the English diphthongs. However, I think we should change the name of Ethel, so not to confuse it with Eth.

My name starts with Oe. (Oenone) I get asked about its origin every time I fill out a form.

spelling The þ' honestly just sounds really cool, so "the new world" would become "þ'new world"

The socalled soft d in Danish is also very similar to the voiced -th in English as in "with", "father", "mother" and "brother" - corresponding to Danish "ved" [veð] ( at, about ), "fader" [fað-er], moder [ mo(u)ð-er] & broder [bro(u)ð-er] etc.

Yes I recall as a youngster in school, learning the letter pronounced as double U. But that was the last I saw of it since it was replaced with the letter W, which is a double V, not a double U.

Æ and Ø used in Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic correspond Ä and Ö used in Swedish and Finnish. (YES, I'm fully aware that the Finnish isn't related to the Scandinavian languages, but it uses the same letters than Swedish, though more systematically.)

You forgot ampersand. It was long regarded as the 27th letter of the alphabet.

'Aesh' can still be found in older texts and novels from the 19th and 20th centuries; I don't think it's found in French, although the 'oe' is still used. I was also actually taught to use a 'longish' 's' in handwriting for all instances in words except using the round s at the end of words.

We still use these letters in Iceland: á, é ,í , ó, ú, ý, þ, æ, ö and ð which changes into Ð when capitalized.

Fascinating - as an English person living in Wales, I struggle with pronunciations - for example, 'dd' is pronounced 'th': I wonder if it's an example of eth being substituted with 'dd' by early type-setters.

Oh nice an awesome video

Ðis video was very informative!

We use *Æ æ* in danish, but confusingly for a different sound. The danish word for 'cat' is 'kat' , and we pronounce it excacly the same. That's not what *'æ* is for. ...so please don't bring back æ and use it for the cæt sound. Anyway, bringing back thorn *Þ, þ* and eth *Ð ð* would be very usefull. And please replace *c* with *k* or *s* as much as possible. Þat would klarify ðings a lot.

æ and oe are also still present in German, sort of. The e wandered above the other vowel and is nowadays written as two dots... making the umlauts äöü. When converted to international spelling (e.g. on passports, mail adresses), it is still written as ae, oe, ue. And the long s was still present in German writing until the 1940s. Combined with short s made the type ß which only subsequently became the seperate infamous German letter (to this day converted back to ss in mail adresses etc.)

I once saw a comic strip that used the following joke based around the long S: Parent: What did you learn in school today? Child: We took a quiz about Thomaf Jefferfon. Parent: How'd you do? Child: (shaking head) I got an S.

Very cool vid

Long s deserves a comeback! Shout out to the German ß while we're at it

Several of these letters have reappeared in the International Phonete Alphabet (IPA)

I think thorn and eth should make a come back as the unvoiced and voiced form of the the sound but be consistent this time. I would also like to see a single letter adopted for ch and sh.