Secret Origins: Y

I can’t believe the last time I did one of these was April. What took me so long?

Y is a weird letter. Not because of the whole sometimes-a-vowel-sometimes-a-consonant thing. It’s weird because while the sound has been around for a long time, the symbol for it has changed like a million times.

First of all, why do we pronounce it, well, “why”? No one knows. In Old English, the Y at the beginning of words like yard and yield was a throaty “gh” sound. The symbol wasn’t Y back then, but Ȝ, or yogh (pronounced “yokh”), an Old Irish letter that kind of combined G and Y. But then the French decided they weren’t going to use Yogh when they were transcribing in English anymore because waaaah! it wasn’t Latin! And in the early thirteenth century started using either Y or gh. Because of course they did.

So where’d the Y symbol come from? Good question, self (thanks, self). Up to T, our letters are all easily traced from Phoenician to Greek, Etruscan, and finally Latin. When the Romans got to it, they added V (which eventually also became U and then W) and X. Because they also took a lot of words from Greek, too, they added Y for Greek words they needed to spell. And they just straight up used the symbol from the Greek letter capital upsilon: Υ. They chose only capital upsilon because lower-case upsilon (υ) was too busy being the inspiration for U.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Dictionary.com

Alphabet Gif

Omniglot

Phoenicia.org

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscans

Mental Floss

Medieval Writing

Evertype

Dr. James B. Calvert at the University of Denver’s page on the Latin Alphabet.

Tony Jebson’s page on the Origins of Old English

Secret Origins: W

I’m sure this won’t be another rehash of U, like the letter V was. Or maybe it will as I’m already rehashing the opening statement.

The alphabet gif has a short lineage for W. See, it turns out, most other languages just used U/V for W. In Etruscan, a version of it was figure 8 they used for the F sound. It was the Germanic languages that used two U’s, or W, to signify the sound for V. It didn’t become “wah” until later, again in Germanic writings (where they also kind of used a P like symbol for the W sound).

So, in neater, list format:

Etruscan:

F = V sound (it’s a soft F, so basically a V)

8 = HF sound (this would be a F like we know it)

V = U (makes the U sound; there is no W sound at all)

Ancient Latin:

F = F (really only used for F as they didn’t use a V sound)

Y = U/W (It looks like a Y, but it’s really a V and it makes the U sound; still no W sound)

Roman Latin:

F = F (again, just F)

V = U (the sound)

VV = UU (started by Germanic languages for the V sound they had; later, it started to be wah instead of vah)

Modern Latin:

F = F

U = U

V = V

W = W

           

Sources

Alphabet Gif

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscans

Medieval Writing

Secret Origins: N

It’s been too long since I did one of these—five whole months! You’ve probably been terrified that you won’t get the information you need but don’t worry. It’s here.

First, some review. In English, we sue the Latin alphabet cultivated by the Romans. For the most part, they adapted the alphabet of the Etruscan region, a place with a unique language now losteven if we still use the symbols. The Etruscans actually took their alphabet from the Greeks, who adapted the alphabet of the Phoenicians for their own use with one major difference: the Phoenicians did not use vowels. Their alphabet was developed from the more pictographic Proto-Sinaitic, one of the first alphabets, created using Egyptian hieroglyphs as symbols for consonant sounds.

Anyway, pretty much all throughout history, versions of N are just M with a leg missing(except for the Greek lowercase nu, which for some reason is just ν). But although M always looked like N, its appearance still evolved over time. In Etruscan it looked like a y or a lowercase n with long legs. If you go all the way back to Phoenician, it looks even more like a y, or even just like a hook. Apparently this is because in the Proto-Sinaitic language, they chose the symbol for “nahas” to signify the n sound. Oh, and nahas? It means snake : ).

TL;DR: it wasn’t enough for M and N to sound alike. They had to look alike too.

Sources

Omniglot

Mysterious Etruscans

Phoenicia.org

Ancient Scripts

Alphabet gif

Secret Origins: I

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. So here we go!

I is related to the Greek letter iota (Ι ι). As you can see, the only thing missing is the dot above the lower case. If you look at the Alphabet gif, you can see its appearance changed a lot over the centuries. Before being a straight line, it was a lightning bolt like shape and before that, it was a shape quite similar to early sigma.

The Greeks adopted their alphabet from the Phoenicians. Although they didn’t indicate vowels, yodh, I’s origin letter was a part of their script. Yes, it was a consonant. Yodh also has a hand in creating Y and especially J (that’s the reason I and J look so similar). I assume it didn’t become a vowel until the Greeks started up their own alphabet and designated it so.

Finally, in the last bit of I’s history that I could find, we can see the reason for yodh’s shape. The Phoenician alphabet comes from Proto-Sinaitic. Like all Sinaitic letters, it’s based on an Egyptian hieroglyph. In this case, the one for arm.

There is one more bit that is related to the letter: it’s use as a pronoun. In Proto-Germanic it was ekan, which came from the Proto-Indo-European eg. Even in English it was ich up until the twelfth century. And the being capitalized thing? To keep it distinct in flowing script. That little i is very small after all.

Sources

Alphabet Gif 

Phoenician.org's page on the Phoenician alphabet

Ancientscripts' page on Proto-Sinaitic

Etymology Online's entry on I

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.

Secret Origins: F

Is it that time again all ready? Yes, because having only word origins is kind of boring. We need to know what the letters are about. And our friend F has an interesting story. For one thing, it’s more related to the letter W than it is to the visually similar E!

First of all, look back at the alphabet .gif. F has two equivalent letters: phi (Φφ), where it gets its sound and the secondary letter digamma (Ϝϝ), where it gets its appearance. Digamma (so called because it resembles a double Gamma Γ) may be unfamiliar to you, but it is indeed a Greek letter, albeit one that fell into disuse sometime around the seventh century before the Common Era/Anno Domini. Yes, it was disregarded that long ago, and its influence is still present.

The reason digamma was not forgotten is that the Romans had a peculiar habit when they spelled things: they differentiated the words they took from outside origins. The reason the word chaos is pronounced with a k sound is because English took it from the Roman spelling, which was taken from the Greek khaos. Similarly, the Romans took digamma, flipped it around and used it for their “f” sounds, except when that word was Greek in origin. Then it kept the phi-influenced ph spelling, as in phobia.

That makes F one of the newer letters on the block, made by the amalgamation of a letter that sounded like “waw” with a sound like phi. The old waw pronunciation of digamma also gave way to u, v, and w, although those three symbols came from a different origin. In linguistic terms, F is called a labio-dental surd (lip-teeth voiceless, because it’s a breath-sound made with your upper teeth on your lower lip).

And right now, you're all making the "ffff" sound to see if that's true. 

Sources

The History of the Alphabet .gif

The Free Dictionary.com

Webster’s Online Dictionary

Etymology Online

The Facebook page on waw/wau (Yes, there is such a thing).

The New Student’s Reference Work

Dictionary.com (because no matter how many times I do this, I forget what surd means).

Secret Origins: E

It’s been a while! What mysteries will unfold about the letter E, the most frequently appearing letter of our alphabet? You know this means we’re going back to the .gif. As you can see, earlier versions had a little tag at the bottom. Some, like the Etruscan version, were facing the other way! The little backwards flag E can be traced back to a little stick figure in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

When we go from Greek further back to Hebrew, we also learn that e used to be…he (ה). Early Semitic writings didn’t have vowels (I talked about this during A), and he meant a rough aspirate (it was tough to find a source for rough aspirate but basically, it’s a sign for a noise we don’t have in English; think of how you’re supposed to say Hanukkah; that h noise is a rough aspirate). It became a letter in the Phoenician alphabet, but unsurprisingly, it represented the H sound.

It was the Greeks who started using he as their letter e—epsilon—for their short e sound (or adding an apostrophe when they did need the h sound—you’ll see more about this when I finally get to h). And because it was the Greeks, one of the most dominant, lasting cultures, other languages followed suit.

Sources

Alphabet.gif 

Temple Study.com’s post on the letter E

Pathguy’s post on the alphabet.

Omniglot, which has pages on Etruscan, Phoenician and Proto-Sinaitic (for better looks at the old versions of letters)

Phoenician Encyclopedia

Secret Origins: D

It’s been awhile. But I will never, ever stop. Until I get to z, then by the laws of our alphabet, I have to.

So what’s up with D? The best spot to see the evolution of the letter is in the alphabet gif I always show you. As you can see, D was also backwards in early Latin, which makes sense considering d (the lower case) faces the opposite direction. The Romans, who used Latin, took their alphabet (but not the words) of some of the people they conquered, the Etruscans, who for the “d” sound, used that backwards D. And the Etruscans, sometime around the sixth century BCE, took their language from the Euboan Greeks, who used Delta, capital Δ and small letter δ, which don’t look all that different from what we use.

The Greek language is old, existing for at least seven hundred and fifty years before what we call the Common Era or Anno Domini and was the first alphabet in Europe. It was adopted from the alphabet of the Phoenicians, also the parent language of Hebrew, who had the D sound symbolized by the word for door, daleth. 

Go back to the gif. The Phoenician symbol looks like a scalene triangle or a tilted flag, not really a door. If you go back even further, to Proto-Sinaitic, it looks even stranger, more like a fish (for a better illustration, go here and scroll down a bit). Talk about ancient—this language is from 1700 BCE. Unlike their symbol using Egyptian neighbors, they used consonants instead of words, adopting the Egyptian daled/daleth (door, specifically a tent door) for their d sounds.  

As to why it looked like a fish, I have no idea. This was something like thirty five hundred years ago. Details are a bit sketchy. Delta is also known as a river mouth, but that wasn’t until relatively recently, in the sixteenth century, so that isn’t the reason. I guess we’re going to have to chalk that one up to a mystery, at least for now.

Sources

Ancientscripts.com for information on Etruscan, Greek and Proto-Sinaitic

Phoenica.org

The Origins of the Alphabet gif

Etymology Online

Ch-Ch-Ch (ch-k-sh)

The origin of the ch sound is significant to deserve its own post, although it isn’t exactly a letter. What is it about c combined with h makes the “ch-” noise of leach or churn? And what makes it sound like k, as in choir or mechanic? And if mechanic has the k sound, why does the similar “machine” sound like sh?

I have a feeling this is going to be a confusing one.

Time to go back to Latin, where the ch sound was pronounced x. Once the language spread to France, the k sound (which was c because Classical Latin only uses k in Greek words) became “tsh,” or roughly what we would call a hard “ch”. It became a part of Old French, the begetter of English, and they started spelling the sound ch, as we know it today. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Anglo-Saxons started using ch in their words. As Middle English evolved, words that had been previously pronounced with a k started being pronounced with a ch (kinn became chin, carite-charity).

Meanwhile, Old French turned into Middle French, where the hard sound of ch was dropped completely, making it sh. Words continued to cross back and forth between the languages and in some words (like charade, from the eighteenth century or chastise from the thirteenth), the sh sound stuck.

As for the third pronunciation of ch, the hard k sound in character, chorus and the like stems from Greek. Like I said, Classical Latin uses k only in Greek words. The Latin for character is from the Greek word kharakter; the Latin speakers just switched the letter to c, which was a “true” letter of their language. And some places, English pronunciation followed suit. 

Sources here are The Online Etymology Dictionary, Eyewitness History, and Omniglot-the guide to languages, alphabets and other writing systems.