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The lost letters of the English alphabet
- adamnemecek 10y agoIf this tickles your fancy, you should check out "Adventure of English" and the eponymous BBC documentary. https://www.amazon.com/Adventure-English-Biography-Language/dp/1611450071/ref=as_li_ss_tl?sa-no-redirect=1&linkCode=ll1&tag=akhn-20&linkId=751fd57f001259dfcc7bdd02c67406be https://www.amazon.com/Adventure-English-Biography-Language/... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihoYL-dUK1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihoYL-dUK1g Did you know that just about every English word that contains the letter combination "sk" is from Old Norse? Skin, sky, ski, skill, skid, skull, skip, skirt etc. Skim isn't though. Until reading this book I never truly realized what sort of a Frankenlanguage English really is.
- pluma 10y ago> from Old Norse Isn't that just a fancy way to say they're from Old English (Anglo-Saxon/Englisc)? This shouldn't be too surprising considering the other main influence of the English language was Old French and the letter combination "sk" is far more common in Nordic languages than in French.
- adamnemecek 10y agoThis is what wikipedia has to say on the topic "In addition, numerous common, everyday Old Norse words were adopted into the Old English language during the Viking age." I think I understand what you are hinting at but regardless, I'm leaning towards no, it's not just a fancy way of saying that.
- kagamine 10y agoIs that what wikipædia has to say? I am fluent in Norwegian but moved to Norway as an adult from the UK and I still struggle with the words for shirt and skirt which are skjørt and skjorte, the sk is more of a sh sound, but the vowel in the middle I still cannot get right, those øs just don't fly with my accent. Interestingly, in Scotland a lot more 'Norse' persists than in English with typical examples including kirk for church, pronounced shirk in Norwegian, and bairns for child much like barn in Norwegian. Other examples I can think of, not just in Scots but in English too, include tor for tower which is tårn in Scandiland (Google translate doesn't recognize tor as an English language word, even though it is used to describe towers all across the UK).
- pascalmemories 10y agoPart of the reason I love watching Scandinavian TV is to listen for snippets that sound just like Scottish-variant English (Scots is something else and neither are to be confused with Scotch). To my ear the snippets even sound like they're said in a Scottish accent and emphasizes that there's no such thing as a 'pure' language as they all have elements of others which have migrated in. I would be interested to see if there was a correlation between the linguistic mix and the DNA origins of these populations - perhaps a cool hypothesis/experiment for someone.
- tyfon 10y agoThere is actually quite a debate around this now. Modern english is much closer to "scandinavian" than old english in sentence construction, so the new thesis is that old english words were adopted by the norse rulers into the norse/scandinavian language. It has later been "perverted" by the french ;) However I do not think this theory would fly in England even if the logic is sound due to nationalistic pride. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121127094111.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121127094111.h...
- jacobush 10y agoSounds strange to me that Danish rulers would import back sentence construction with such gusto all the way back to eastern Sweden? Is it not more likely the Danish sentence construction filtered down into common English with time?
- tyfon 10y agoI am a bit stuffed today due to a cold, what I tried to explain is that there is no "Old English" in modern english. It was wiped out during danelaw and replaced with scandinavian. They did however adopt local "Old English" words into scandinavian and eventually it evolved to modern english. Scandinavian languages did not change due to this. Read the article, they explain it much better than me ;)
- jacobush 10y agoNow that makes sense.
- arnsholt 10y ago> However I do not think this theory would fly in England even if the logic is sound due to nationalistic pride. Also, most linguists who are experts in the history of English (Faarlund is an expert on Norse, not English) tend to border on the dismissive when considering Faarlund's theory of English as Norse dialect.
- Svip 10y agoThe Anglo-Saxons lived in England before the Vikings arrived. So no, they are two distinct languages. The Angles and the Saxons came from Northern Germany, long before the Vikings decided to invade. The Viking invasion was significant, heavily influencing English society and language. Many old towns in England still have the old Norse town ending -by. Effectively, there are three main sources for English: * The Anglo-Saxons, arriving around the time where the Romans left. * The Vikings, arriving around 800-1000. * The Normans, arriving around 1066. Not that English haven't changed significantly since then, but these three periods represent the largest number of words increases. The other changes have primarily been spelling.
- jacobush 10y agoAlso remember the Normands spoke not only French but some kind of Norse. Still in Normandy there are Norse/Scandinavian names for places. Besides, Saxon and Norse languages must've been pretty mutually intelligible, even today German and Swedish is pretty similar even with a millennium or two apart.
- stan_rogers 10y agoThere were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. As for the Norman influence, it was mostly vocabulary... but changing the languages of documentation to Latin (mostly) and French (in law, for the most part) left English a lot of room to progress away from the Old English that was, by that time, already playing the same sort of role that Latin did in the Early Romance period - it no longer reflected the language that people lived in.
- jacobush 10y agoHaha, so Saxon and Norse cancelled each others' grammar out? :)
- theandrewbailey 10y ago> There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. It's why English nouns lost their masculine and feminine grammatical gender. The people who used both languages had more important things to worry about.
- stan_rogers 10y agoNo. For instance, shirt is from Old English, while its cognate skirt is from Old Norse. We gained quite a bit of vocabulary from the Danelaw, and lost a lot of the grammatical complexity (gender and inflection) at the same time. Apart from vocabulary, French barely touched the English language; it was the Vikings that messed things up terribly by settling in with the common folk up north.
- jacobush 10y agoAnd many "french" were from Normandy i.e. barely reformed Norse. Just look at the name "nor man dy".
- mnw21cam 10y ago> Until reading this book I never truly realized what sort of a Frankenlanguage English really is. "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll
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- DonaldFisk 10y agoIf it wasn't, it might look like this: https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftish-beholding-aka-atomic-theory.pdf https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis... Other "Frankenlanguages" include Japanese, Tagalog, and Maltese.
- jdmichal 10y agoNote that this wouldn't remove Norse influences, since Norse is also Germanic.
- kagamine 10y agoHalf of those words make no sense in modern Norwegian. A run through of the list and their approximate pronunciations in English would be: Skin: shin never heard this said, GooTranslate gives "full" but "full" is "hel" in Norwegian sky: she meaning sky (the vast expanse above your head) ski: shee meaning ski like a plank of wood strapped to you foot for travelling on snow. skill: sheeel to divide or separate. Bears no relation to English that I know of. skid: sheed not a word I know in Norwgian skull: shool again, not a word I know in Norwegian, the word for skull is 'hode' skip: ship a thing that floats and is bigger than a boat. skirt: sheert not a word, but probably from skjørt meaning the same.
- admax88q 10y ago> sky: she > ski: shee > skill: sheeel For a moment there I hoped you were just going to keep adding e's to as you went down the list.
- kagamine 10y agoIt's quite hard for me to get across the slightly differing sounds as it'snot my native tongue. That is why I used "approximation" in my comment, but yes it does seem like an ever lengthening ee sound. The rule is that if the vowel is followed by a double consonant it's a short vowel, single consonant means long vowel, so bil = beel and bill = beeel. But as a non-native it can be very hard to distinguish during a conversation and I am often misunderstood. In fact, I'm not even sure I have the rule the right way around :(
- tallanvor 10y agoWell, couldn't you use skalle for skull? Or hodeskalle? I'm not a native speaker, but my understanding is that hode is more general than the skull.
- kagamine 10y agoHa, yesterday I even saw a sign over a low door upon which was written "skall skall ikke". So yes, you are correct with skalle. I have a terrible memory.
- amyjess 10y ago> Did you know that just about every English word that contains the letter combination "sk" is from Old Norse? Skin, sky, ski, skill, skid, skull, skip, skirt etc. Also, skirt and shirt are doublets. Skirt comes from Old Norse, and shirt is native English, and they both come from the same Proto-Germanic root.
- mason240 10y agoThere is a great podcast you might like on the subject: The History of English Podcast https://history-podcasts.com/history-of-english-language-podcast https://history-podcasts.com/history-of-english-language-pod...
- _petronius 10y agoI didn't know about the pronunciation of "ȝ", and the examples in the article about the silent "gh" helps explain some modern German/English cognates: "daughter/Tochter", "thought/gedacht", etc. The northern dialect of Middle English that the Pearl poet wrote in ("The Pearl", "Gwain and the Green Knight") makes use of this letter, much more so than Chaucer's more southern English. It's actually possible to read Chaucer with the help of some vocabulary tips -- the Pearl poet, at least in my experience, is way harder.
- jacobush 10y agoEnglish: though Swedish: dock Makes sense now. The Scandinavian pronunciation is one step harder on the scale with German in the middle.
- pacaro 10y agoAlso dough, duff, dog, and dick, are all the same word (when used in traditional British cooking)
- pacaro 10y agoA little surprised by the downvote. these cognates are how we get dishes like "plum Duff", and "spotted dick". Grocery stores sometimes bowdlerize the latter to "Spotted Richard", but "Spotted Dog" would be more appropriate
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- infradig 10y agoAnd also hot dog. The 'dog' being the dough or bun, not the meat in the middle.
- DanBC 10y agoWait, what? Do you have a cite for that, because everything I've seen calls the meat the dog. This use is from maybe the 1880s when any sausage was called a dog. http://www.snopes.com/language/stories/hotdog.asp http://www.snopes.com/language/stories/hotdog.asp
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- wfunction 10y agoWell now I want to know when and why these disappeared!
- Symbiote 10y agoI've read that thorn and eth were replaced with Y because printing presses were imported from Germany. They had Y, but lacked Þ and Ð, so Y was used instead.
- ptaipale 10y agoI would think they mostly disappeared because the same sounds could be represented by combinations of letters in the Latin alphabet which was used and recognized universally throughout Western Europe. They didn't have standardized fonts those days, but the method of reproducing literal material by manually copying manuscripts still encouraged towards a simpler set of characters, resulting in much the same kind of thing. I Guess the slightly simple Brother Jonas was told that "oh come on, you once again messed up your ð and now that parchment is ruined, why don't you just write th instead?"
- adamnemecek 10y agoProbably the same way the kaiser stole the word "twenty".
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- ptaipale 10y agoCuriously, the article mentions Icelandic for æ, but not for ð or þ, which are still on regular use in modern Icelandic, pretty much in the same Old English meaning of dental fricatives (ð is voiced, þ is voiceless).
- vesinisa 10y agoIndeed, and œ would be close Icelandic ö (in ASCII-only systems umlaut ö is still often rendered as oe). The 'yogh sound' for words like 'loch' is really the only one altogether missing from modern Icelandic.
- runarberg 10y agoI always presumed that the œ ligature was later collapsed into ø, which is how Danish and Norwegians write the letter ö.
- arnarbi 10y agoö in Icelandic and Swedish is phonetically equivalent to ø in Danish and Norwegian. However the æ in Danish and Norwegian is like the OE one described in the article, between a and e, which is written ä in Swedish. Icelandic does not have that sound, and uses æ in the Latin way, representing the ai diphthong (as in English "fine"). The more common vowels also have fairly different pronunciations in the four languages.
- dwc 10y agoSpeaking of þ, it has a role is the oddball "Ye" in "Ye Olde ..." form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde#History
- duality 10y agoThanks for linking this. I'd read previously that the use of the letter y in "ye olde..." was from simplifying the typesetting of thorn but the article here claims eth was used in the original spelling. Is there more to the story or is the article wrong?
- aap_ 10y agoThere are a few points wrong in this article. First of all the <y> of <ye> does not come from <ð> but from <þ>. Secondly in Old English the letters þ and ð are used promiscuously, voicing has nothing to do with it. In other languages this is different, but the article seems to be about english specifically.
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- metafunctor 10y agoSeems like you know quite a bit about the subject. Would you care to enlighten us with lesser knowledge about how <y> came from <ð> instead of <þ>? The article says “ðe” became “ye” because of the voicing, but you say voicing plays no part – so as an amateur linguist I'm already confused. Was “the” originally spelled “þe” instead of “ðe”?
- acqq 10y agoI've just found in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde "The anachronistic use of "ye olde" dates at least to the late 18th century, as seen in the image at below right (image 1908). The use of the term "ye" to mean "the" is based in Early Modern English, in which the could be written as þe, employing the Old English letter thorn, þ. During the Tudor period, the scribal abbreviation for þe was EME ye.svg ("þͤ" or "þᵉ" with modern symbols); here, the letter ⟨þ⟩ is combined with the letter ⟨e⟩" Wikipedia links to MW: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ye[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ye[2] "Origin and Etymology of ye alteration of Middle English þe the, from Old English þē; from the use of the letter y by printers and scribes of late Middle English to represent þ (th) of earlier manuscripts First Known Use: 1551" And finally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Old_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Old_English "The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, as was ð; unlike ð, however, thorn remained in common use through most of the Middle English period. Both letters were used for the phoneme /θ/, sometimes by the same scribe."
- Xophmeister 10y ago
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- gilgoomesh 10y agoI'm pretty sure that the "Y" in "Ye olde" is a thorn, not an eth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) since after the loss of wynn, the thorn was drawn to look like wynn (which is basically an uppercase "Y" with the left ascender in line with the descender and a loop on the right ascender). If you're interested in discarded letters, this list has 12 letters (although the definition of "letter" is a little looser): http://mentalfloss.com/article/31904/12-letters-didnt-make-alphabet http://mentalfloss.com/article/31904/12-letters-didnt-make-a...
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- peterburkimsher 10y agoSo W won, and Wynn lost? FTW.
- jacobush 10y agoAlas, not for the wynn, as it were...
- beefsack 10y agoThose of us outside the US would still see some usages; "encyclopædea" in particular isn't uncommon.
- porges 10y agoThat's mostly because Encyclopædia Britannica is styled that way.
- fifnir 10y agoWhich is because the word was made by french based on the greek εγκύκλιος παιδεία εν-κύκλος (in circle) --> εγκύκλιος παιδεία (education) The core, generalized education one should have. Words like paedagogic etc are also spelled like this in english (uk) because the language maintains the historic spelling
- DonaldFisk 10y agoThat's a ligature for the "ae" diphthong in Latin though, rather than the ash character of Old English. There's also an "oe" diphthong, hence "oestrogen", "foetus". British usage usually preserves the "a" and "o" in those diphthongs.
- fifnir 10y agoAnd Latin used ae "to transliterate the Greek diphthong αι (alpha iota)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86) Oe is also used in the same way I suppose, oestrogen for example comes from οιστρογόνο so in this case oe is transliterating omicron iota. Some more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_of_Greek_origin#Written_form_of_Greek_words_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_of_Greek_origin#... I was actually a bit disappointed that she doesn't mention all this in the article, "ae" is not aesthetical (another greek-derived word) ffs, it very often maintains the historical orthography of the word which I feel is very important.
- nommm-nommm 10y agoYes, "Encyclopædia Britannica" not English, it's Latin. "Encyclopædia Britannica" means "British Encyclopaedia" in English.
- user982 10y agoIf only Q would follow them.
- DonaldFisk 10y agoIt was absent from Old English, which used "cw" instead of "qu".
- vorg 10y agoThe letters C, Q, and X are redundant for representing sounds in English, but are used uniquely in Chinese pinyin, from which English might plausibly import thousands of words in the very near future.
- rubyfan 10y agoUgh, great now I'll never read "Ye Olde" the same way.
- JacobAldridge 10y agoIt's fun pronouncing it 'correctly' though. As if English really has a "correctly" of course. And by fun I mean in a smug, self-satisfying way.
- rubyfan 10y agoYeah my New Years resolution is to stop being that guy that says "well actually" followed by something smug. I'm certain I've broken this already.
- MayeulC 10y agoNot to forget the long S [0]. I got pretty confused with it the other day, when reading a old French book (a Lavoisier memoir on diamond combustion). It seems to have been quite popular in a variety of languages, giving the (nowadays) German ß. While this is technically an "s", the way it was written "ſ" can be confusing, as it is quite close to "f". [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
- JacobAldridge 10y agoI did a university course on Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe - reading text that talked about familiars (mostly cats) "sucking on their mistress" took some getting used to with the long "s"!
- ben0x539 10y agoThis is my favorite bit long-S trivia: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sun%2Cfun&year_start=1600 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=sun%2Cfun&year...
- amyjess 10y ago> While this is technically an "s", the way it was written "ſ" can be confusing, as it is quite close to "f". And when set in italics, it looks like the integral symbol: ſ (depending on your font, it may or may not have a descender) In fact, this is where Leibniz got the idea for the integral symbol: it stood for ſumma, Latin for "sum".
- nl 10y agoI had a bad experience on a bus in Vienna, trying to work out where the hell something "straBe" was, when the bus kept announcing "straße" Yes, my German is pretty bad.
- memsom 10y agoSadly, full of misinformation, half truths and bad conclusions.
- pdkl95 10y ago"Why Do We Have "Ye Olde"? Obsolete Letters, and the Mysteries of Ye Olde Ming", by Tom Scott https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVWvkZbhgAc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVWvkZbhgAc
- sjclemmy 10y agoIf this floats your boat, can I recommend an excellent book by Michael Rosen which combines whimsical prose with an interesting history of the english alphabet. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alphabetical-Every-Letter-Tells-Story/dp/1848548869 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Alphabetical-Every-Letter-Tells-Sto...
- thomasfl 10y agoÆi løved this. Please write måre. As a Norwegian citizen I really loved this. Would love to see a blog about English words and names of places with Scandinavian origin. It goes for words like "trim" and places with names ending with -by.
- tyfon 10y agoAsk and you shall receive. Not quite a blog, men den får duge :) https://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/vikings/vikings_live/old_norse_origins.aspx https://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/vikings/v...
- thomasfl 10y agoA database of hundreds names of places on the British islands with Scandinavian origins. Thanks a lot / Jævlig bra. :-)
- snarf21 10y agoThis is kind of interesting as this weekend I randomly came across the history of &. It was once taught as the 27th letter of the alphabet and was read as "and". To make it clearer when reciting the alphabet, students were taught to say "X, Y, Z and per se and" for X, Y, Z, &. (per se in this case meaning by itself). Eventually "and per se and" became ampersand. :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand]
- Navarr 10y agoThere's even more fun history, in that & is a ligature of et. (Citation: same wikipedia page)
- talideon 10y agoAnd W is a ligature of 'UU'.
- HelloNurse 10y agoMore 'VV', per traditional Latin spelling. 'U' is a relatively new letter.
- amyjess 10y agoTraditionally, the uppercase was written as 'V' and the lowercase as 'u', though sometimes the lowercase would be written as 'v' at the beginning of a word (compare with 's', which was written as 'ſ' except at the end of a word). It's not so much that 'U' was created as a brand-new letter as it was that they split 'V' and 'u' into separate letters.
- masswerk 10y agoTraditionally, there was no uppercase and lowercase. These were actually just stylistic variations of the same letters. First, there were majuscules (uppercase only), then came minuscules (lower case). Following another trend of highlighting certain letters, e.g., the first in a sentence, for example in red ink, eventually majuscules were used for this purpose. Thus, uppercase and lowercase. Edit: "u" was another stylistic variation of "v" in minuscule alphabets. So the use of both of them side by side is rather an anachronism as it combines forms of two separate eras. Edit: Regarding the long form of "s", this is also an important part of the ligature "ß". There's still an ongoing discussion, whether it is for "ſs" (ss) or "ſʒ" (sz), and, if "ß" should be split into "SS" or "SZ" in German uppercase writing. (While entity escaping suggests "szlig", some sources and old typographic forms indicate that it may have been "ſs" originally.)
- talideon 10y agoThose interested in this might also be interested in the History of English Podcast: http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ Recent episodes have got up to the Early Middle English period, which is when the language's modern orthography began to take shape, including some of the now lost letters of the alphabet.
- ascotan 10y agoI've been fascinated by this for years and years. I've known about thorn, but I didn't know about eth and how thorn and eth are pronounced differently. FTFY :) "English hæs alƿays been a living languæge, changing and evolving wiþ use. But before our modern alphabet was estæblished, ðe languæge used many more charæcters ƿe’ve since removed from our 26-letter lineup. ðe six ðæt most recently got axed are:"
- porges 10y agoFYI: `languæge` and `charæcters` don’t make much sense—‘æ’ and ‘œ’ usually changed to simple ‘e’ in modern English (Encyclopædia, mediæval), unless at the start of a word (æsthetics). There are variations, ‘œ’ seems to have been more likely to change to ‘e’ at the start of a word (œsophagus, œstrus). Also, not every ‘ae’ was an ‘æ’—‘aerial’ is one example. I think the test is whether or not the Greek word used ‘αι’.
- kwhitefoot 10y agoAre you trying to say that in modern English that œsophagus has become esophagus? If so then you need to qualify it as American English; British English still uses oesophagus.
- porges 10y agoYeah, I originally qualified everything and then figured most readers of the site are USian anyway ;)
- jheriko 10y agowhat about the long s?
- OliverJones 10y agoFrom reading old records in the cellars of churches and libraries in New England, I believe part of the progress of the writing of ð (eth) to y and then to "th" involved writing the y as a superscript at the beginning of words. Any truth to this? Or was it just an oddball habit of New England scribes?
- peter303 10y agoWhen traveling in Iceland recently it is useful to learn eth and thorn because they are all over the place
- astrodust 10y agoIcelanders seem to find our "Ye" interpretation to be stupefying and amusing.
- Cuuugi 10y agoI just appreciate that i learned something from someone named Poindexter.
- samirillian 10y agointeresting how much ȝ resembles the arabic "ghayn" غ, which is the same sound.
- pacaro 10y agoIt's interesting that Welsh orthography has these sounds, but makes different transliteration choices into the Latin alphabet. For example, dd is used for eth (I once worked with a woman called "Dydd", presumably short for Meredydd), and ll is used for yogh. Some people will argue about the correct capitalization of 'ff' when used in names like ffion. My knowledge of welsh is limited to road signs and watching S4C whilst inebriated. The contribution of a native speaker would be appreciated.
- zeveb 10y agoPersonally, I really wish þat we'd bring back 'þ' instead of 'th' (there's no real need for 'ð', since originally one is a rune and one is a variation on a Roman character, but if we wanted then we could use 'þ' for soft 'th' & ð for hard 'th'). I'm not terribly keen on reſtoring 'ſ', ſince it really is eaſy to confuſe for 'f.' Given our modern orthography, I don't see any real need for 'ȝ' & 'æ,' as much as I like them both. But honestly, 'þ' really ought to make a comeback.
- amyjess 10y agoI just want to see the use of diaereses come back for words like coöperate and reënter. > I'm not terribly keen on reſtoring 'ſ', ſince it really is eaſy to confuſe for 'f.' Depends on the font, really. It looks great in italics, especially when using a font that gives it a descender... looks more like the integral symbol than 'f'. It irks me, though, when fonts give ſ a half-crossbar in the roman. Fortunately, the monospace font I'm using when writing this reply doesn't do that, and it also gives ſ a sharper curve at the top left, so ſ and f look pretty distinct in it. I want the ſt ligature to come back, though. It looks really slick.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> It looks great in italics, especially when using a font that gives it a descender... looks more like the integral symbol than 'f'. It looks like the integral symbol for much the same reason uppercase sigma looks like the sum symbol.
- SixSigma 10y agoMy copy of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations still has economics written as œconomics.
- cr0sh 10y agoNot only do I find this fascinating, I also find it fascinating how many of us here at HN find it fascinating (as witnessed by the number of comments and up-votes). I'm loving the discussion, too!
- donquichotte 10y agoI want to offer the author my most enthusiastic contrafibularities for this interesting ærticle.
- white-flame 10y agoDid these letters have an ordering in the otherwise A-Z alphabet sequence of today?
- caleblloyd 10y agoIf we just had one more of these letters, Base 64 encoding wouldn't need the / and would be URL friendly if you strip the trailing =. Dang.