Have you ever seen a place that calls itself “ye olde whatever”? As it happens, that’s not a “y”, or, at least, it wasn’t supposed to be. A must-read over at mental floss features a few more. The other far-flung rejects come from Iceland, Rome, and elsewhere. The sad story is that this most useful letter didn’t make it into the final cut for our 26-letter alphabet. Before too long, however, people just began using thorn for both (and later ‘th’) and so eth slowly became unnecessary.” As such, you’d often see texts with both eth and thorn depending on the required pronunciation.
Back in the old days, the difference was much more distinct. “Note that, depending on your regional accent, there may not be much of a difference (or any at all) in the two pronunciations anyway, but that’s Modern English. “Originating from Irish, it was meant to represent a slightly different pronunciation of the “th” sound, more like that in ‘thought’ or ‘thing’ as opposed to the one found in ‘this’ or ‘them.’ (The first is the voiceless dental fricative, the second is the voiced dental fricative). That is why the word ye, as in “Ye Olde Booke Shoppe,” is an archaic spelling of the.Ever wonder why we use the same letters “th” for the “this” and “thin”? It is not always so in foreign languages – and didn’t have to be in ours. So, thorn was dropped and Y took its place. In the Latin alphabet, the Y was the symbol that most closely resembled the character that represented thorn. Here’s an example: in Old English, a letter called thorn (þ) represented the th sound (as in that) in Modern English. (Our trusty alphabet isn’t the only part of the language that has changed- October used to be the eighth month, and September the seventh.) What is the letter thorn? The ampersand was part of the alphabet? Discover the story behind the symbol here.Īs Modern English evolved, the Old English letters were dropped or replaced. But for some time, the alphabet included the letters of the Latin alphabet, some symbols (like the ampersand), and some letters of Old English. The region they inhabited became known as “Angle-land,” or England.Įventually, Christian missionaries introduced the Latin alphabet, which began to take ahold around the sixth century, and ultimately replaced Anglo-Saxon. The Angles and Saxons came from Germany and settled in Britain in the fifth century. English was first written in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, also known as Anglo-Saxon. How old is the alphabet?īefore we get to the history of specific letters, let’s talk a bit about Old English. The English alphabet, as you likely know, is made up of 26 letters.īut it wasn’t always that way.
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