Comments on: Letters that fell out of the alphabet

By: Garry

Garry — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 13:04:47 +0000

Good Post, many useful comments, thank you all.

@ Dave Tate: No, the German ‘Eszet’ comes from the long s (‘Es’) and a Form of z (‘Zet’) with a downward line like a ‘g’ has. (look up Sütterlin (Suetterlin) alphabet or Fraktur alphabet for examples of this form of z and the resulting ß.)

By: Chris Morgan

Chris Morgan — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:37:29 +0000

Some designs of Ampersand are still clearly stylised “Et” combinations. You can see these in the Robert Bringhurst book on typography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Style

A good book which explains about English losing letters as it transitioned to latinate print is The Lexicographer’s Dilemma by Jack Lynch http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/books/01book.html?_r=0

By: Dave Tate

Dave Tate — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 23:24:23 +0000

I’m not sure how reliable that site is. It got the pronunciations of edh and thorn backwards, and I’m really skeptical about the idea that the insular form of ‘g’ was somehow used for a different sound, except in the sense that many latin letters represent different sounds in Erse than they do in (say) English or Latin.

‘That’ wasn’t a letter; it’s one of very many shorthand abbreviations common in the days when parchment or vellum was scarce, and copying by hand was tedious. You might as well claim that the ubiquitous mediaeval tilde over vowels (to indicate a missing ‘m’ or ‘n’) somehow defined a bunch of separate letters.

I’m surprised they didn’t mention the tradition of writing a double ‘s’ as a long s followed by a modern s — which is where the German ‘Eszett’ (ß) character comes from. It’s just a ligature of the long and short s.

By: John

John — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:14:42 +0000

The long S is where the integral sign comes from, S for “sum.”

By: Gunnar

Gunnar — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:14:06 +0000

That last “æ” should be “&aelig”. This ſucks.

By: Gunnar

Gunnar — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 20:11:48 +0000

Ash (or Æ, as we call it) is a fairly common letter in Danish and Norwegian. In Danish Wordfeud it only gives 4 points. It took some effort to get it recognized in the Unicode standard a letter (LETTER AE) and not just a ligature (two letters printed very close). The HTML entity is “æ”, somthing that annoys me every day .

Long S gets OCR’ed as lowercase f, with some interesting results when trying to the historical use of the F-word.

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 19:17:09 +0000

Re: Unicode in Emacs.

C-x 8 is set to ‘ucs-insert’ in emacs 23 and later. With earlier versions you need to just do M-x ucs-insert , then enter the code.

By: Adrien Lamarque

Adrien Lamarque — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 12:33:41 +0000

Indeed, ash and ethel are still (to this day) official letters in French. They’re known here as “l’e dans l’a” and “l’e dans l’o” (“the e inside the a” / “the e inside the o”) and in many words, they are commonly mispronounced with regars to their original pronounciation.

(As far as I know, Icelandic also uses both thorn and eth).