Secret Origins: V

I’m sure this won’t be a total rehash of U. I mean, these letters are nothing alike.

First, go look at the alphabet gif and you’ll see that there was no V before early Latin script evolved into modern. That’s because the symbol V was interchangeable with U—basically, some people wrote the letter round, some people wrote it pointed. But everyone pronounced it U. As for the sound V…they wrote that using F. When they wanted to use the F sound, they paired F with H, similar to how we use sh and th. Until they made their own symbol for it, a lost glyph that looks like an 8.

Okay, so we know V was U, so let’s look more at the history of the symbol. Early Latin sometimes wrote U as a Y—well, there was no Y then, so it’s not like it mattered. Etruscan did the same thing, using Y and V interchangeably for the U sound. The Greek upsilon has a lowercase that looks like a cross between a v and a u (υ), while the uppercase just looks like Y (the Y sound was under its domain, so it makes sense). Before that was the Phoenicianscript, but since they only used consonants, there was no symbol for V. When the Greeks first adapted the alphabet, they used the Phoenician waw symbol, which looked like a Y and sounded like a W, to create their V.

TL;DR: Everyone makes up their own sound for letters. It’s a miracle we can communicate at all.

Sources

Alphabet Gif

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Secret Origins: K

The symbol K has a pretty straight forward history. We got it from the Romans, who used it—sometimes—in their Latin language. They got it from the Greeks, where in its lowercase form it was κ and its uppercase is indistinguishable from ours. It can also be seen in Hebrew as כ. Slightly different, but K was often written backwards and if you take of the vertical slash it resembles kaph somewhat. Both kaph and kappa come from the proto-Sinaitic kappu. If you look at the alphabet.gif, you can see the origins of K in there.

From the origins of our Latin based writing system, K was in competition with C. The Romans preferred to use the latter and as you know, pretty much anything the Romans did stuck. You might not remember this from when I went over C’s history (over a year ago! Wow!), but the influence of the Irish language involved consonants with different pronunciations based on what vowel follows. We kind of kept that with C. After e and i (and y), it’s almost always “suh”; after a, o and u, it’s “k”. The main reason K is used is to put the “kuh” sound in front of e and i, as in the words keep and kit.

So K is our backup C. It handles the words C can’t because it doesn’t go soft in front of e and i.

Sources

Alphabet.gif

Online Etymology Dictionary

Omniglot

The Evolving Ultrasaurus

The Alphabet Family Tree

Happy Thanksgiving! I know not all of you celebrate it (or you celebrated it last month) but it’s my favorite holiday and I hope you all feel as happy as I do today.

It’s Thursday, the day I traditionally do etymology, but because it’s also a special day, I thought it deserved a special post. Here’s the basic line of decent of the Latin alphabet, which English and many other languages use.

Note 1: I’m not getting into all the details of the different offshoots. This is just straight from the alphabet we use to its earliest ancestor.

Note 2: The letters are approximate. Over the years, many were added and dropped.

Note 3: Times are also approximate. Honestly, when you get back to about two thousand years ago, there’s only so much that’s recorded. The further back, the wider the margin of error. When you get to the bottom, it’s about five centuries.

Sources

Omniglot's pages on Latin, Etruscan, Greek, Phoenician, Proto-Sinaitic, and Ancient Egyptian

Mysterious Etruscans' language page

Greek-Language.com's alphabet and history pages

Phoenicia.org's alphabet page

Phoenician.org's alphabet page

Ancient Scripts's pages on Latin, Greek, Phoenician, and proto-Siniatic

Secret Origins: G

G, like C, is one of those funny consonants that has two different pronunciations. It can be soft, sounding similar to J, as it is in gem or gym, or hard, like it is in gam or gum. Also, it’s sometimes part of words that don’t end in m.

We’re going back to the .gif again, aren’t we?

Darn right. It’s probably not surprising that G comes from gamma (Γ or γ) and because of that, its history is the same as the letter C. Gamma comes from the Hebrew letter gimel, ג, which as you can see, looks a lot upside down lowercase gamma. Hebrew is an old language, originating more than a thousand years before the Common Era, and it stems from the language of the Phoenicians. Now if you look back at the .gif, you can see the Phoenicians’ gimel was a lot more similar to the upper case gamma, except reversed and leaning backwards. This symbol is in fact sort of a pun: gimel means camel in Phoenician, but the symbol is of a throwing stick, or giml. Like the rest of the Phoenician alphabet, it was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Okay, so that gives us the origin of gamma, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, gamma encompassed the letter C and all the soft c sounds with it. Where, and how, did it become its own letter?

After the Greeks made their alphabet (around the eighth century Before Common Era), they spread it to the Etruscans of Italy. The Etruscans were the ones who changed the “guh” sound to “kuh”, and when the Roman Empire rose, they absorbed that alphabet, creating Latin. But this left them without a sound for “guh”, so they decided to add a stroke to the letter C and make a new symbol, giving us G. So there is a reason they look similar!

So that’s how G was born, but what about the “juh” sound of it? Is it only there to mess with people trying to learn English? Originally, g was always hard. But then, an accidental overdose of gamma radiation altered its body chemistry and a startling metamorphosis occurred. Similar to C, G has been palatized, except it isn't constant based on the following letter. Look at gentle. And gird. No one who grew up speaking English says gen-tell or jird.

The different pronunciations are on a word-by-word basis because English is a Germanic language with many other influences. Words of Germanic origin (like Germanic itself!) usually have the hard G. Words of Romance (i.e. French) origin usually follow the soft-hard rules of the Irish Gaelic: hard before or after a, o and soft before e and i. Note that I said usually. Look at margarine. It precedes an a, but you say it soft.

If you ever hear anyone from another country pronounce a g wrong, correct them, but be gentle. It really is freaking confusing. It's like we're looking into a world of madness. There are no rules. Cats chase dogs up trees. Hamburgers eat people. The sky reflects the orange color of the ocean. Pandemonium!

Thanks to these sources:

Phoenicia.org, for info on all things Phoenician.

Omniglot, an excellent source on alphabets.

The Alphabet Gif, as always.

Ancient Scripts, an excellent authority on…ancient scripts.

Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short’s A Latin Dictionary from Tufts University's Digital Library.
Encyclopedia.com, for their information on hard and soft G. 
The Online Etymology Dictionary, for showing us that words can and do break the rules.

And Dictionary.com. Because palatize is a weird word.