Secret Origins: Z

Since it is the last month of the year, I thought it would be a good time to finally reveal the origins of the last letter of the (Latin) alphabet. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for…five years?! Seriously?!!!

Z’s use in English is because of Anglo French, where it represented the “ts” sound, which is pretty close to how we say Z today. If you look at the alphabet gif (which is making its last appearance here, I guess), you’ll see that Z is actually between F and H. That’s because in the Greek alphabet, Zeta comes in between Epsilon and Eta, which are the symbolic origins of E, F and H. Z probably got stuck at the end of the alphabet because the Romans used it for translating Greek words, so they just added it as an afterthought.

But let’s go back to the gif. Between the Greek and Latin versions, there was Etruscan, where the symbol for the “dz” sound actually looked more like an I despite both Greek (which came before it) and Latin (which came after it) using Z. Although if you look at Z’s in ancient English, some of them do look awfully I like. Maybe the Z symbol was influenced by S, which could have a Z sound. But that’s totally guessing on my part. For all I know, the two have nothing to do with each other.

Now, Etruscan took their symbol from Greek, where it was a Z, but in the most ancient version of the Greek alphabet, it was that I so I guess the switch happened somewhere in Greek history. And before Greek, there was Phoenician, which again, was I. The name of it was zayin, which meant, get this, weapon. That’s the earliest known meaning attributed to the symbol as before that in Proto Sinaitic, their Z looks like an equal sign and has no known meaning. Is it the same as that I? Why did they change from I to Z anyway? Did the Phoenicians come up with Z being a weapon on their own? And why?

Ha ha, like anyone actually knows.

Sources

Online Etymology Dictionary

Alphabet Gif

Omniglot

Phoenicia.org

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscans

Medieval Writing

Evertype

Fordham University

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

A-to-Z Challenge: X

X is the hardest letter to come up with a word for, which is why I think we should make it the “ch” sound. This challenge would be a lot easier, then. So what did I come up with for this year?

X. That’s it. The letter X. I literally started planning this a year ago so my recurring Secret Origins series would have the letter X fall in April. All for the Challenge. Or Xallenge.

Anyone? Anyone at all?

Oh, nuts to you guys.

The alphabet gif I always refer to doesn’t have much for X. Etruscan, the language we got our alphabet from, has kind of a Y with an extra line in the middle that they used for the “ks” sound, and then before that there’s the Greek chi, which is just an X. It’s not that surprising that the history of X ends with Greek, who used it for a hard kh sound. Now, the Greeks got the alphabet from the Phoenicians, who didn’t have an X (they did have a similar symbol in their history, but it was what turned into our T). So basically, X was invented by the Greeks because they liked to use different consonants for different vowel sounds.

Sources

Alphabet.gif

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscan

Phoenician.org

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: 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: U

Getting close to the end now!

If you look at the alphabet gif, you’ll see that in early forms of Latin writing, the letter U looks surprisingly like Y and V. This is because before then, we didn’t have V as a sound, so our writing system ancestors Etruscan and Greek all have V and all pronounce it U (for the V sound, they used F because that’s how it used to be pronounced). Of course, before Greek, there’s Phoenician and Proto Sinaitic, neither of which have a U because they’re abjads and don’t use vowels.

TL;DR: (as if this could get any briefer) U looked like V, when it actually existed, because the V sound was just F.

I’m sure none of this will be repeated when I do the letter V {crosses fingers}.

Sources

Alphabet gif

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

And U

Secret Origins: T

T time!

Don’t you judge me.

T is one of the more stable symbols. If you look at the alphabet gif, you’ll see it’s always pretty much two intersecting lines. It’s funny because some versions of T are, well, on a slant. Latin’s parent alphabet, Etruscan, has similar weirdness with T, with some versions tilty and some with only one arm. I guess when there’s no computerized fonts (or even a printing press), it all depends on whoever’s writing it.

T is much more stable in Greek, where it’s always a T or in lowercase, τ. I guess when something’s not broke, you don’t fix it : ). The Phoenician consonant alphabet that gave birth to the Greek had a bit more variations, using a simple cross that looked like a + sign as well as another tilty T. Whatever it looked like, the symbol was called teth and it meant “mark”, as it was in the proto Sinaitic it was taken from.

Well, that was an easy one.

TL;DR: T’s pretty much always been T :P.

Sources

Alphabet gif

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscans

Phoenician.org

Secret Origins: S

Letter origins, yay!

Back when S was first written in the Latin alphabet, it used to look more like a lightning bolt, with really hard edges. As I’ve mentioned in previous alphabet posts, Latin took its letter symbols from Etruscan, where it was written in the opposite direction. Because…it was fun? Let’s go with that.

The Etruscans took their alphabet symbols from the Greeks. You might think that’s weird since the Greek sigma capital is Σ and the small letter is σ. Doesn’t get much farther from S than that! But you should know that there’s more than just one Greek alphabet. The Euboan Greeks, the one that gave the alphabet to the Etruscans, had a partial lightning bolt for S, but other Greek cities used a sideways M that looks a lot more like the sigma it evolved into. Don’t ask me about the small sigma, though. That answer’s just going to be “for fun” again.

Going further back, there was Phoenician. They actually had more than one S, using samekh, tsade, and sin (shin), and it seems our S came from the latter, which meant tooth and looked like a lying down lightning bolt that looked a lot like a W. So S looked like a lot of other letters before it was S, although I guess the jagged edges do kind of look like teeth. Even earlier, in proto Sinaitic, it looked like a rounded W, which apparently meant bow. But I haven’t been able to find confirmation on that, so for all I know it means butt. Which would be hilarious. And now nothing will ever be as funny as that bit of fakeness.

Sources

Alphabet gif

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscans

Phoenician.org

Secret Origins: R

Yay! I love doing histories on letters of the alphabet!

For those new to my alphabet posts, let me give you some of its ancestry. The writing system we use in English is the Latin Alphabet, which was taken from the Etruscan alphabet somewhere before the sixth century BCE. The Etruscans were the people who lived in Italy prior to the rise of the Roman empire and little is known about them these days except by writings of other (rival) societies, but they did adapt an alphabet from the Euboean Greeks that passed on to the Romans, and thus, the rest of western Europe. The Greek alphabet is at least 2800 years old, a hell of a long time considering its still in use.

It was created using the Phoenician abjad—a consonant alphabet, meaning the Greeks added the vowels themselves. The Phoenicians developed their writing system over three thousand years ago, taking it from what we now call Proto-Sinaitic, which was created around 3900 years ago. Proto-Sinaitic was developed to aid the Canaanites that used it in their trades with other countries—keeping track of things was a lot easier when you were able to write down records. It’s also pretty much the ancestor of all of western civilization’s current alphabets, including Hebrew and Arabic along with our Latin. The symbols were taken from Egyptian heiroglyphs—they picked a word that began with the same sound, and used that glyph for it.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can get down to business. Look at this alphabet gif to get an idea of R’s evolution over the years. The early Latin R is missing it’s second leg, making it look an awful lot like P (P on the other hand is missing it’s closing loop, making it look like a backwards 1). It was backwards in Etruscan, but then frontwards (at least, from our point of view) back as the Greek rho. You can go here if you want a better look at rho’s history, where sometimes it actually looks like an R (so I guess it makes sense that we have it like that) and sometimes it even looks like a D!

In Phoenician, it’s resh, which means head, and it looks like a backwards P. Why would they do something like that? Well, resh, or rashu in proto-Sinaitic, means head. And what does that P symbol that means R kind of look like? A head. And that’s where R comes from.

Sources

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscans

Phoenician.org

Alphabet gif

Secret Origins: P

I love doing these. It’s been too long.

P’s kind of a weird letter, as it seems to have changed form in each alphabet that preceded ours. Our Latin version of it comes from an Etruscan symbol that looks more like a backwards 1 (or possibly a 7). Latin took it from the Greek pi, and while these days we mostly know pi as the tiny, table-like Π or π, originally it taller and missing a leg, similar to the Etruscan version.

I’ve mentioned this before, but the Greeks were the first in Europe to create a full alphabet. They based their letters on the Phoenician consonantal alphabet, a cousin to Hebrew. The Phoenician P is more of a hook rather than the angular symbol Greek has, plus it’s also facing in the opposite direction. Why it changed so much is anyone’s guess.

Of course, the story doesn’t end (or begin, rather) there. Phoenician developed in around 1500 BCE, but it was created from an already existing consonantal alphabet called Proto-Sinaitic, which is probably the first of said alphabets to develop. If you look at the .gif again, you’ll see that the Proto Sinaitic symbol probably came from the Egyptian hieroglyph for finger, which is a symbol that again, looks nothing like what we know it as.

TL;DR: P’s form was changed around a lot. I guess no one liked how they wrote it. And PS: it isn’t related to the letter R at all.

Sources

Alphabet .gif

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Phoenicia Encyclopedia

Mysterious Etruscans

The Forgotten Letters

All of us who type solely in English are probably used to twenty six and only twenty six letters (some other languages get more, the lucky ducks), but as I’ve mentioned in several Language of Confusion posts, there have been tons of changes to the Latin alphabet over the years. Some letters have appeared out of nowhere (we’re all looking at you, J) and many have just disappeared.

These are their stories.

…I miss Law & Order.

Yogh (capital Ȝ, small ȝ, although it evolved over time much like other letters) came from an Old Irish form of the letter g. The pronunciation was a hard, throaty y-g sound, if that makes sense. Because it looked like a Z, a lot of words that were supposed to have yogh instead had a z. It’s how the name Mackenzie got its Z.

Thorn (capital Þ, small þ) is one of the old th sounds. It has a straightforward pronunciation, like th in math or thesaurus. The reason old timey signs say “ye” is because that y is supposed to be a thorn, making it “the”. It’s because thorn kind of looked like a y in some of its evolutions.

Eth or edh (capital Ð, small ð) is the other of the old th sounds. It’s pronunciation is much softer than thorn’s, more like if you barely said the th (compare how hard you th when you say the word “math” to when you say the word “this”).

Wynn or wen (capital Ƿ, small ƿ), from an old runic alphabet, is an old character for w back before w existed. When W showed up, wynn wasn’t cool anymore and faded into obscurity.

And there are plenty more where those came from, but I’ve bored you enough for today.

Sources

Omniglot

Mental Floss

Medieval Writing

Evertype

Briem.net

Secret Origins: O

It’s definitely been too long since I’ve done this! Really, I’m way too excited about it : ).

O is a circle, such a basic symbol that it also represents the mathematical nothing. If you look at the alphabet gif, our O is the same in Etruscan, the language of the people who passed on the symbols (although not the language) to the Roman Empire, which would one day spread it to England and make its way through the years to us. That symbol came from the Greek omicron, where it’s the fantastical symbol…O. And lowercase o. Shocking, right? But interesting side note: omega (Ωω) is also an O in Greek (mega and micron, big and small). It used to specify the long o vowel while omicron was the short, but these days they’re mostly the same.

Back to business. The Greeks came up with their alphabet by copying that of the Phoenicians, who used the symbol O, but not as a vowel. See, the Phoenician language is what’s known as an abjad, or consonant alphabet, meaning they had no symbols for vowels—making it the “oh” sound was the Greeks idea. The Phoenician O, or Ayin, did not symbolize a sound at all. Way backwith the letter A I mentioned that the Greeks made a letter from the symbol for a glottal stop (basically it’s like not saying a hard consonant, like t, before another consonant (“pet dog” becomes “peh dog”)). Anyway, the Greeks did the same thing with O, this time taking a symbol for a voiced pharyngeal fricative. I can’t really explain what that is, but they have an audio example on the Wikipedia page for it. It’s something like “aaah”.

The voiced pharyngeal fricative (say that three times fast) is also how the Proto-Sinaitics the Phoenicians descended from used the letter. It also means eye, although the letter is pronounced something like ‘en or enu. Sure enough its original symbol was a flattened oval or an elongated one with a dot in the center. They took the symbol from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the Proto-Sinaitic word for eye was attached to the Egyptian symbol for it.

TL;DR: More than four thousand years ago O was an oval with a dot, but since then it’s been a circle, even when it didn’t represent the sound we know it as.

Sources

Omniglot

The Mysterious Etruscans

Phoenician.org

Ancient Scripts

Harry Foundalis’s page on the Greek language.

Alphabet gif.

Macmillan Dictionary

“Letter Perfect: The A-to-Z History of Our Alphabet” by David Sacks.

And Wikipedia. But just for the sound! It wasn’t research, I swear.

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: M

I may be the only one, but I love finding out where letters come from. It’s so weird which sounds we pick to have symbols for and which ones we don’t (no “ch” letter, although it’s a common sound, nor “th” anymore), and the fact that sometimes we have more than one letter for a sound (look at the overlap between C and S, C and Q, or J and G). And when you try to figure out the whys of letters, the best explanation you can come up with is “because”. Ah, linguistics!

The history of the letter M is pretty neat as the symbol has remained fairly constant throughout history. Okay, I think it’s neat. The modern Latin version is virtually identical to the Etruscan M, although some versions have an elongated line at the end similar to the Greek lowercase mu (μ), while the capital Μ is, as I’m sure you noticed, no different from what we have. Hundreds of years, thousands of miles, but M is M.

Brief side note: I’ve mentioned this a few time (like, in every letter post) but the Romans who popularized our alphabet took the letters from Etruscan, a now extinct language. The Etruscans in turn copied their alphabet from the visiting Greeks, who were the first in Europe to have an actual alphabet—which is defined as a letter system with both consonants and vowels. And if you go all the way back to ancient Greek, M still doesn’t look all that different. Some dialects have the swoop of the mu more pronounced, but the two peaks remain constant until it evolved to the more modern form.

Now, the Greeks were the first to come up with a traditional alphabet, but they weren’t the first to have one. The Phoenicians had what’s known as an abjad, an alphabet with only consonants, no vowels, and their mem is basically the ancient mu flipped around. The Phoenician alphabet evolved almost four thousand years ago from a Proto-Sinaitic base where the symbols were taken from Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. The shape of M starts to make more sense when you realize that the proto-Sinaitic mem came from the Egyptian word for waterand the jagged line symbolizing it was supposed to look like wave crests.

TL;DR: M is wave peaks.

 

Sources

Alphabet .gif

Mysterious Etruscans

Ancient Scripts

Phoenicia.org

Omniglot

Secret Origins: L

 Time for another one.

Unlike some of the letters I’ve covered, the sound L is fairly common among languages. But the symbol for it? Man, is that complicated.

In Latin, L visually started out with the angle pointing more towards the bottom. Before that we have Etruscan, where the symbol is facing the other direction and looks more like an upside down numeral one. The Etruscans borrowed their alphabet from the visiting Greeks, hence spreading it to Rome where it morphed into Latin. The Greek Lambda (Λ) is again more like a triangle, while the lower case (λ) is a triangle with a tail on top. It seems like the Etruscans changed it a lot, but really it’s just the variation of writing styles between the different regions of Greece. If you look at the comparison chart here, you can see changes among the different cities. It looks like the Greeks created the capital Lambda from the Phoenician letter L, which they used for small Lambda, then dropped entirely when it was replaced by a variation on capital Lambda.

Like I said, the Greeks took their alphabet from the Phoenicians, prolific traders of pre-history who invented the earliest form of the alphabet in order to keep track of their wares. While later incarnations resemble the upside down 1 of the Etruscans, early versions of the Phoenician Lamadh are symbolically more like our C or G and when you go further back to proto-Sinaitic, it’s just a whirl (or a shepard’s crook, which is one of the translations for the Egyptian hieroglyph it was taken from). However, if you harden the points of the whirl to corners, you can see the vestiges of the triangular Lambda. You can also note the differences in another alphabetic descendant of Phoenician, Hebrew, where it showed up as Lamed (that’s lah-med, symbolized by ל). With the leftmost leg upright like that, it’s more like a lightning bolt, but it does seem similar to the proto-Sinaitic whirl.

Sources

The Alphabet Gif

Phoenician.org

Omniglot

Ancient Scripts

Mysterious Etruscans