The 7 Forgotten Letters of the Alphabet
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- Опубліковано 18 тра 2024
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The English alphabet contains 26 letters. These 26 letters represent all the sounds the English language has to offer. Or, does it? Thinking about it for a second, you probably realize that no, the English alphabet doesn't contain all the sounds of the English language. At one point, the alphabet had almost 30 letters. And so, in this video, we’ll go over the seven forgotten letters of the English alphabet.
Sources:
From Old English to Standard English by Dennis Freeborn
We used to have six more letters in the English alphabet by Hannah Poindexter qz.com/914372/we-used-to-have...
10 Letters That Didn't Make the Alphabet by M Asher Cantrell
www.mentalfloss.com/article/3...
Music:
Sneaky Snitch, Scheming Weasel, the Snow Queen and Midnight Tale by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
This video was sponsored by Brilliant.
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.
Well, if the English language ever adopted æ, ø and å…. 😂
Im all for actually Eliminating 2 letters from the alphabet. This being Q and K and using them as single character numbers for Ten and Eleven (for base twelve). Why... because Q and K are really both "C" sounds which can have small modifiers. Almost no Q words are without a "u" after it which is tantamount to (example) a Cue. The letter Q makes a good Ten because it has a 0 with a 1 in it below. The letter K makes a good Eleven because its two 1s but one of them is crinkled like a straw into the other one.
I thought the long s from a book was an f
Æ Œ Ñ ẞ Ç
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.
Fact:The missing letters ressemble the total of 33 letters (26+7=33)
im icelandic so i can confirm that Þ, Æ and Ð are in icelandic!
And the metal world has Icelandic to thank for the best and most authentic version of "My Mother Told Me" performed in Icelandic (with an English chorus) by the German band Saltatio Mortis.
I am close to intermediate level in Norse and in Icelandic, advanced level in Dutch, intermediate level in German and Swedish, close to advanced level in Norwegian, writer level in English, beginner level in Faroese / Danish / Gothic etc and the other Germanic languages, and I highly recommend learning Norse / Dutch / Norwegian / Icelandic / Gothic etc, which are as pretty / refined / poetic as English, definitely too pretty not to know, and the other Germanic languages as well, as they are all gorgeous - the letter æ does exist in most Nordic languages like Norwegian / Danish / Norse / Icelandic / Faroese etc, and the eth letter is also used in Faroese, and the œ is actually an EO sound (normal e sound + normal o sound said fast in one sound) like the Ö in German / Icelandic / Swedish etc and like the Ø in Norwegian / Danish / Norse / Faroese etc, so the letters ö and œ and ø represent the same sound EO with different spelling, and the œ letter is used in Norse and in French and in East Norse!
In fact, the best version of þat Mælti Mín Móðir is the version by the band Skáld, which has very pretty (and very epic and cinematic) sound and vocals, definitely way better than the other versions that are on yt, and it can be considered both Norse & Icelandic because it uses the Icelandic spelling of certain words like höggva with ö which isn’t really a Norse letter, while the words þat and at use the Norse spelling with t at the end, and most other words exist in both Norse & Icelandic with the same spelling - all other Skáld songs are also awesome and super epic, so Skáld music is one of my favorites!
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’.
"Used to be AA" I'll be dead and buried in Almen Kirkegård before I spell Aalborg with a Å.
@@wxyz9035 I would translate "strøm" as "current", in the sense of a flow of things (such as water or electricity), not in the sense of the present or of current events. Usually there's a current in a stream.
Also, being a citizen of vikingstan, I definitely þink Ængliſh would benefit from mœr letters.
polish has y as in English word myth
soundless ae
aa sounds like hungarian ā
In Finnish we just use Ä and Ö, plus the Å for Swedish names whenever we must use those.
The long s is for the cat hissing spitting sound fs used to write words as psalm in nordic over looking like falme Nordic for Fade and was replaced with latin Ps
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.
Fr. I am not native English and don't know how to pronounce words like the, this, those, these, they, thine, thought, tough, through etc.
Don't worry about it... I'm not a native English speaker, but if there's one thing I've learned reading 16th century letters, back when English spelling was NOT standardized and everyone spelled words... however, it's this: it doesn't matter, nothing matters in English. When you see the same guy, in the same letter, spell the word cousin in 2 different ways: "cosyn" and "cowsigne", you realize we've been fretting over the wrong things in learning English. You just have to roll with it, without worrying about rules. English is a wild west of languages. Learners will get it eventually, they just need to keep listening and seeing the language and they'll get there when they'll get there.
Actually some of these lost letters are still in use in dictionaries
let's simplify pronouncing so they wouldn't need such problems at all
less is more
@@szymonbaranowski8184 I agree. That’d be more helpful, but it might be too much to ask at this point.
BRINGBACKTHORN!!!
Need to brink back thorn, ash and Ethel. Would make our language look more aesthetic
Æsthetic
@@user-fq7eh3jz7u And make þe emoticon :P more anatomically correct: :þ.
*BRINGBACKÞORN
Here's what it would look like: fcsuper.blogspot.com/2014/01/using-thorn-to-write.html
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.
It would be interesting see what would’ve happened if the Tironian et won out over the ampersand
Cool, is that why you cal Z "zet" in german? Couse et = and in latin = &
I am &erIsHidden
I knew that and thats funny because the ABC song says "y and z" but everyone thinks its trying to rhyme
Afaik, it was a type for printing/writing combining e t for the latin and (et).
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.
In german we have ß as Kombination of SZ or ss
In spanish we used to have three "double consonants" (CH,RR,LL) that were officially single letters due to the fact that they represent sounds different from the actual concatenation of the corresponding written letters. We had 30 letters in total.
So the capitalization, as well as the alphabetic sorting used to be different:
For instance "CHile" used to appear in a dictionary after "Colombia", now "Chile" appears before.
The change happened sometime near 1995.
@@depp8714In German, we have 30, too (+ ä, ö, ü, ß). Now even in upper and lower case. SZ / ß is never used at the beginning of a word, thus the letter never existed in upper case. This had been defined a few years ago, not because of a change in the position, but that the problem is fixed, to write a word correctly, if everything needs to be in capital cases. 😉
Are you sure about Ij alongside IJ being considered correct? I’m relatively young but I was learned that both letters should be capitalized in unison.
In Afrikaans, the Dutch "IJ" has become "Y" with the same pronunciation.
Ash (AE æ) is still used in British English, for example, encyclopedia/encyclopædia. There are many others, particularly in printed text.
Never seen people use this
Æ Œ
Æ*
Æ:❌️
AE:✅️
@@charlespg3d190vertabræ usually is written using
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).
Yeah when I read old texts where they use the long ſ, it's such a pain in the neck.Don't ever bring it back, please.
But ß is fun.
@@lakrids-pibethis only shows that you havenʼt been used to reading old texts. For me, it was the same. But if you het used to reading old texts, itʼs completely natural.
Bring it back
I always wondered why the Eszett was written like that.
It honestly looks so much more like a Greek beta than s + z letter, but I didn't know s used to be written that long.
I remember seeing it but I get the point of why it gotten rid of, because I thought all this time that was, in fact, a stylised f 😆
@@AstropelekiNot all of Germany calls it „Eszett“ anyway. Many regions call it „sharp S“
Is З a tailed Z? (This isn’t 3, It was a Russian Z.
Proud to be keeping Æ alive and well in the English language!
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!!
You are wrong æ have some use in French but I admit there is few words that use this letter. Like in Præsidium or Æther. You have also the word Supernovæ. But again the use of this letter is scarce.
@@Exoneos Yes, it was used, but nowadays it's usually a plain é. The œ letter in French, if it denotes the "é" [e] vowel (usually in borrowed Latin terms), is also often written é. The only stable use of œ is to denote the [œ] sound, typically in combination with "u".
@@ExoneosDon't forget Lætitia (and the song of Gainsbourg)
Ex æquo... et cætera.
@@pierrelaurentborel Isn't it nowadays "et cétéra"?
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
dont see enough of ðe þorn and eð broðer
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.
It is a separate phoneme. It has a grapheme in runes (ing/eng), but not the standard OE Latin alphabet.
@@AutoReport1 In terms of usage, it's dependent on accent. Every language has a range of how a specific phonetic is produced before it becomes a different one or silenced. Even when it was a letter, it would have been pronounced in a similar range as today from a clear g to a glottal stop to no g. Modern English speakers might say it when they drop the g between words that end by and a word or syllable that starts with a voiceless letter; for example, wingtip.
Those bridge sounds in English and many languages aren't generally treated as their own letters. Another example, schwa is both the sound of a vowel's weak form and the aspiration of consonants in some accents or for emphasis, but is never treated independently when it's an aspiration, such as in Bambi when he says, "bir-duh."
it's in the unifon alphabet
As a history teacher this has quickly become one of my favorite channels on UA-cam, great video as always 👍🏾
The long S never died... ask a mathematician about integration and "hello, long S"
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 integral sign in Calculus is a long s; since integration is a form of continuous summation using a long s makes sense.
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'.
Thorn and Ash really need a comeback
Why Ash?
@@cerebrummaximus3762 cause some names sound better with the "ae" sound. even beyond english. Aethelred, Haemon, Daemion, Daenerys
Elon Musk is already starting with his child
@@reginaldcampos5762lmfao
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.
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
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. 😉
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).
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.
The symbol "æ" is in used in the IPA, if that is what you are referring to.
I see œ and æ every so often in either medical textbooks or UK prints in words like fœtus and fæces in particular. Could never tell if it was like he said in that sometimes an author is feeling fancy or if there is some sort of rule in medical lingo
And in encyclopædias.
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."
or dubble V, because that is what it is
It is interesting that you mention differentiating between vowels in Danish. For us in Norway, many Danish vowels sound the same :-)
Or just dubble-V scince that’s what it is
Double V*
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 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’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.
ſ?
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
it will be reduced to 72 emojis (or 72 demon sigils)
This was great! Thank you!
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).
in my new alphabet, i used sh, ch and ⱨ, but, since you want only one letter, i suggest š and č for sh and ch.
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!
There are lots of place names in Scotland spelled with a z, but the sound is yogh. Examples are the farms Milzeoch , Pennyfadzeoch and Altizeurie ( all in Ayrshire). In Culzean Castle the z is silent, though.
Not to forget Andy Dalziel's remark "I don't trust any bugger who gets my name right without being told" (or something like that - better memories than mine will get it right)
Is it really Eſsex and Suſsex? How are those words pronounced? (I am no English)
@@deutschermichel5807 eſsex~eßex [ɛsiks] , suſsex~sußex[sʌsiks] in Standard modern English
@@deutschermichel5807 I think you would pronounce them like Eßex and Sußex.
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.
but what is Wat?!
@@idw9159Gwant and Wee! 😂
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.
That is debatable! Some say the alphabet may have come from either Syria or Mesopotamia. Demotic Egyptian characters may be a possibility. The dissemination of the Aramaic script right across the Asian continent as far east as Mongolia and Manchuria but not the Chinese and related cultures was due to Syrian Nestorian Christian missionaries.@@johngarofano7356
@@johngarofano7356 The Egyptians wrote with a hybrid logograph/abjad system that was similar to a rebus (think modern emojis). In those days vowels didn't exist as letters with the sole exception of glyphs for "A" that denoted a glottal stop.
Always been a fan of Ð/ð and Þ/þ since i first learned about them.
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.
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.
Very interesting, thank you!
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.
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.
Did they really write *Mild-þreþ* with both *d* and *þ* ?
I think I like the spelling *Mild-þryð* better. Here's we get *d* *þ* and *ð*
Love your content, thanks for posting, great vid!
Very informative! Well done.
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.
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!
To the layman, it would appear so.
@@alanfbrookes9771 Good sir, I am no “layman” for giving a positive comment on a video that clearly put effort and passion towards the subject they are teaching.
Yes, there is not entire accuracy or deeper description of the history of these letters (such as the slow transition to Middle English not actually ending the complete usage of these letters in multiple words throughout the progression of English, and people often focusing on American English over traditional English spelling, making it appear to be used less-so, etc.), but to go out of your way to infer a good attempt at work as mediocre, and those who praise it, a layman? Or that they only know history at an amateur or unprofessional level? It is outright immature.
I’m a professional historian and author praising someone who clearly finds these subjects interesting and desire to share it. If you believe it is necessary to insult the intellect and passion of multiple people to maintain whatever immature ideology you have on academics, then you should learn to develop an equal pursuit of wisdom and class and before trying to share your intellect. People will be far more willing to admire this intellect of which you clearly want people to commend, if you’re willing to try and balance it with virtue and compassion.
Encourage people to make correction, don't demean the author or audience to raise yourself for whoever you are trying to impress. Be a critic, but be a useful one.
@@alanfbrookes9771Ƿī do you nœd to bi toxɪck?
It was so interesting. I had no idea. Thank you for explaining all of that.
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.
The diaeresis (not an umlaut, which is two _different_ dots above a vowel) along with the grave are the only two diacritical marks actually native to English orthography. Famously the New Yorker Magazine still uses is, as do some Canadian publications, in words such as coöperate, reëlect and so on. Also the Brontë sisters. But not Horatio Nelson's duchy of Bronte because Italian doesn't need it to make the pronunciation clear.
The grave has hardly even that relic use any more except in poetry - even there it can seem parodic; Time's wingèd chariot and all that.
18ᵗʰ and 19ᵗʰ century philologists tried "fixing" English spelling not with any idea of making it easier but "purer" by making it better reflect the etymology of words. Interfering sods would have done better to leave well alone but they did breath a last gasp of life into ash which I fined æsthetically pleasing, and in fact is still typeset in scholarly works. I was last able to set it in print myself 30 years ago. A subsequent attempt (in a headline) was rejected, not even for oe just plain e, as the deputy editor ruefully admitted, e were writing for an audience that barely graduated high school.
@@calmeilles There still exists a remnant of the diaeresis used to denote a separate pronounced vowel today: the constellation Boötes where Arcturus is located.
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
He could have said that the fricative sound represented by the ough spelling in modern English represents the way they were pronounced in earlier times. We still say dochter , thocht and bocht in Scots for daughter, thought and bought.
I presume you are Greek. English "h" is not pronounced the same as Greek "h".
In English, "h" is pronounced as Air from the throat.
In Greek, it's pronounced by locking your tongue where "g" and "k" are.
Greek "h" (χ) is the unvoiced counterpart of the Greek letter "γ".
English has no such correlation.
The "ch" in "Loch" is not pronounced the same way as "h" in English, but rather a more graspier "h" more like the χ in Greek.
@@cerebrummaximus3762 I’m not “greek” I’m Hellene! We never used that term for our nation, this is a Roman mistake.
I tried to bring it closer to an English speaker because each time I’m trying to explain the χ sound they get confused by the English x and the pronounce it either like x in exit or x in xenophobia…
But yes, you’re correct.
It’s more like the letter χ in our language though!
@@Kolious_Thrace Hello, I am from Bulgaria, and I too am a Balkan nationalist. I know what it feels to want history to go the way you want it. Sadly that is not always the case.
You are "Greek". That's just your name in English. Whether you want to be called a Greek or not isn't up to you, in English that's what you are called.
Btw Hellene is an existing term (albeit referring mainly to the former Royal family), however "Greek" is the mainstream and official term in English.
You can't change language, that's just the word for it in English: Greek.
I can try tell everybody to call me a "Bûlgarin" (българин), but the mainstream term in English is "Bulgarian", and it is pointless to try and change that.
Similarly, in Bulgaria, there is no such thing as a "North/Slavic Macedonian language", we legally consider it a dialect of Bulgarian.
But in English, it is considered a seperate language. No matter how many times I try tell everyone "it's Bulgarian that got Serbianised under Tito", I can't change anything, because it is known differently in English.
@@cerebrummaximus3762 English adopts words as they are. The case of our name messed up during the Roman era! They got it wrong from the very beginning and for their reasons they started calling us Graecia when our name was Hellas…
English adopted the wrong term from Latin, in this case isn’t English’s fault!
You your case the two terms at least sound similar: Bulgarin and Bulgarian.
In our case is a completely different term…
Graecia doesn’t mean anything but Ελλάς / ellás does!
It’s adopted as Hellas in English and other ancient civilisations also calling us Hellas.
I’m Chinese is “Seelà” as near as it can get to el-la(s)
In Japanese is He-ra-su < He-la-s(u)
El means Sun (Helios)
Las means rock/soil/land
Hellas means land of the Sun, Hellenes means sons of the Sun and Hellenic means language of light.
Graecia… nothing 🤷🏻♂️
Bulgarians from Vardarska are a different story! They are completely brainwashed…
They deny their identity and they claim to be something that is impossible to be…
Even I not been a Slav can understand that they speak a Serbo-Bulgarian language, using the Cyrillic alphabet like many other Slavic countries etc
Also, the term Balkan was brought here by the turks. They adopted it from Persia/Arabia.
In Hellenic we don’t call our region Balkan.
"LOST" but now refound!
Truly, this is a great day.
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The long s is still used extensively in mathematics as the integral sign. It represents the concept of an idealized infinite sum.
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.
interesting
Don't forget oeconomy
Loved it 😊
So far, just the 'eth' the D with a crossbar as it can't easily be mistaken for another letter.
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?
A, Ă, Ā, Á, À, E, Ĕ, Ē...
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.
Excellent
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.
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.
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.
Thank You Now I Learned What Letters Are Not Used
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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.
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
Ðis video ƿaſ væry ȝood and helpful Þanks!
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.
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.
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.
Bravo! While today's youth are wasting multiple hours on social media, baby boomers like myself are improving our minds viewing videos like this.
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"
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.
We MUST bring back all of the Letters!
Very interesting
"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.
Also; foetus and oestrous.
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.
Ðis video was very informative!
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.)
'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.
Yes, æ is used in French for some medical words, the first name Lætitia... et cætera 😉
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.
My name starts with Oe. (Oenone) I get asked about its origin every time I fill out a form.
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.
but k is almost not existent in Latin. In ancient Latin, c = k, always. Therefore k was the useless letter imported from the Greek alphabet.
the word “clarify” comes from Latin “clarificare” (to make clear). This in return cimes from clarus (clear, bright, famous), which was pronounced with a k.
You could introduce a k-rule for Germanic-origin words. But for foreign words it makes it only confusing to learn where they came from and why are written in a strange way. I tend to really appreciate it when foreign words with weird pronounciation are written in another way, which indicates and signifies instantly: Attention, foreign word!
ð is still used in Icelandic. Þ is in the beginning of words ð in the middle or end for the th sound.
praying that we bring back œ and long s 🙏🏽💯
just start in everyday life. Make your notes with it. Try typing with it. And when your friends ask what it means, tell them and thus they might do the same
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.
I was sure you were gonna include the ng (symbolized as an "n" connected to a "j" without the dot on top). You actually see this in respellings in dictionaries. I'd like to see that one brought back.
Oh nice an awesome video
Ash was still used in Melbourne (Australia) newspapers in the 1800s in at least the word manoeuvre.
I still regularly use þ when I can be boþered to change my keyboard layout lol. Fun fact: my Grammarly web browser extension doesn't even flag it for correction lol. I've seen a number of your videos about alphabets and writing systems now. Do you think you will ever do a video about the Shavian alphabet?
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.)
The long s was in use in the "Gothic" script used to print German, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish throughout the 19th Century; in Germany it was retained until after WWII.
I have a personal story with the long s. When I started reading Cervantes' Don Quijote, I thought and read it like an f until I found enough words to wonder if it wasn't actually an s, which it was. When I learned about the long s, I resume reading Don Quijote using the rule "if now it is an s, then it was an s" (fuente=fuente but fiempre=siempre), rule that I made up but proved useful also with other books of the same period. Years later when I started violin I learnt that the f holes were actually long s holes.
I think we could eliminate some more letters from English. Like, we could use "x" or "z", you dont really need both. However, since w=x+y+z is used in three dimensional math, I dont see any of these letter going away any time soon.
The long "S" as described in the video is still used in Calculus specifically to denote the length of an integral. Also, the long "S" is used in music notation.
The local weekly newspaper, Berrow's Worcester Journal, has been published since 1690. Until mid-1800s they used the long S, then one week they discarded it's use.
Long s deserves a comeback! Shout out to the German ß while we're at it
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.
We still use these letters in Iceland: á, é ,í , ó, ú, ý, þ, æ, ö and ð which changes into Ð when capitalized.
In Iceland Æ sounds like the word eye.
I now understand the humor in an old cartoon where it mentioned "the purfuit of happinefs" -- those aren't a "f" at all!