Anybody knows at what time J, W and Y where incorporated in the Latin
alphabet ? What about AE (which is typed as one letter in Dansih and Norwegian
and sometimes in latin words such as anaestisia ?)
Helene
27
Feb
Origin of the letters AE,Y,W,J
posted by admin in Uncategorized and have Comments (13)
13 Responses to “Origin of the letters AE,Y,W,J”
H Thygesen (edb…@find2.dbc.bib.dk) wrote:
: Anybody knows at what time J, W and Y where incorporated in the Latin
: alphabet ? What about AE (which is typed as one letter in Dansih and Norwegian
: and sometimes in latin words such as anaestisia ?)
In anglosaxon, ae was adapted from latin. I don’t know how it’s
pronounced in latin, but english needed/needs one more a than the
roman alphabet provides.
W was invented by french-norman scribes and was originally uu (a doubled
u–double-u, get it?). It was used in place if the anglo saxon letter
wyn which represented the same sound and was derived from a rune. Wyn
looks sort of like a b and p overstrike. Apparentnly the french scribes
didn’t like anglo saxon letters because we lost wyn, ash, eth, and thorn.
J and V were originally just variants of I and U. In early latin there
was no difference between the sounds. Somewhere between then and now,
they did become distinct sounds and the letters eventually became distinct
as well.
I don’t know why romans used QU instead CW like old english. Y came from
upsilon but I don’t know how or why.
—
The Brothers of the brooding Dark, | smr…@netcom.com PO Box 1563
the Fathers of the fighters stark, | Cupertino, California
that left their might, the Lake and Height,| (xxx)xxx-xxxx 95015
and met the Mother moist and dark. | intolerance kills
On Mon, 29 May 1995, Ahmed wrote:
> In anglosaxon, ae was adapted from latin. I don’t know how it’s
> pronounced in latin, but english needed/needs one more a than the
> roman alphabet provides.
It is pronounced 2 different ways in Latin.
In Classical Latin, it is pronounced like an English long-i
In Medieval or Church Latin, it is pronounced like an English long-a
> J and V were originally just variants of I and U. In early latin there
> was no difference between the sounds. Somewhere between then and now,
> they did become distinct sounds and the letters eventually became distinct
> as well.
I think the distinction started as I & U were used when the sounds were used
as vowels in words, and J & V came to be used when the sounds were used
as consonants.
Rick Kephart Malvern, PA <r…@netaxs.com>
_L.P.H. Resource Center for Catholic Homeschoolers_
http://www.netaxs.com/~rmk
In article <smryanD9CBE8….@netcom.com> smr…@netcom.com "Ahmed" writes:
[deletia]
> W was invented by french-norman scribes and was originally uu (a doubled
> u–double-u, get it?). It was used in place if the anglo saxon letter
> wyn which represented the same sound and was derived from a rune. Wyn
> looks sort of like a b and p overstrike. Apparentnly the french scribes
> didn’t like anglo saxon letters because we lost wyn, ash, eth, and thorn.
Pick the right font, and l.c. thorn looks exactly like a b+p
overstrike. (Edh and thorn are in the ISO Latin-1 font at D0/F0
and DE/FE, as Icelandic still uses them.) In the Unicode book
wyn/wynn looks like a p with the bowl distorted upwards – in ISO
10646, IIRC, it looks like a harp, with the straight edge vertical.
[deletia]
—
Stewart Hinsley Managers are the servants of their staff
stew…@meden.demon.co.uk
In article <smryanD9CBE8….@netcom.com>, smr…@netcom.com (Ahmed) wrote:
> Y came from
> upsilon but I don’t know how or why.
This was recently discussed in another thread. Y is used in later Latin
borrowings from Greek (Earlier borrowings used U). It is surmised that Y
(which derives from capital Upsilon) was used to represent upsilon after
upsilon came to be pronounced as a high front round vowel in Greek (like
french u) rather than a high back round vowel. Latin U was drived from
small upsilon.
–
R.T.Edwards r…@elmo.att.com 908 576-3031
In article <smryanD9CBE8….@netcom.com>, smr…@netcom.com (Ahmed) says:
[...]
>J and V were originally just variants of I and U. In early latin there
>was no difference between the sounds. Somewhere between then and now,
>they did become distinct sounds and the letters eventually became distinct
>as well.
The original forms are I and V, J and U are later variants, derived from
minuscles.
They both stood for two different sounds in latin, namely for one vowel
and one semi-consonant each.
Later the different version were used to distinguish the sounds,
so I and U were used for the vowel, J and V for the consonant,
but with the exception that after G,Q U was also used for the consonant
instead of V.
>I don’t know why romans used QU instead CW like old english. Y came from
>upsilon but I don’t know how or why.
That’s because indoeuropean languages had two different "k"-sounds, (as
semitic languages do have til today). In the greek alphabet these two
sounds were represented by kappa (hebrew "kaf") and a letter "koppa" (hebrew
"qof") (between pi and rho, this letter later was replaced by kappa, but when
using letters as number symbols still remained). In latin the cognate to koppa
is Q, the cognate to kappa is K, which was replaced by C (which is the
cognate to gamma), so the pair C/Q in latin is a reflex of the difference
between these to sounds (in the transscription of Arab, there the to sounds are
still distinguished, it’s used k and q, resp.) In old english the two sounds
had become the same, and therefore were equal written, both by C, while the
consonant V (original QU was QV) in english is generally replaced by the
"double V" W.
Chris
H Thygesen (edb…@find2.dbc.bib.dk) wrote:
: Anybody knows at what time J, W and Y where incorporated in the Latin
: alphabet ? What about AE (which is typed as one letter in Dansih and Norwegian
: and sometimes in latin words such as anaestisia ?)
: Helene
According to my charts, Y was derived from the old Hebrew(/phonician) waw and
then ‘misplaced’ to the end of the alphabet, the waw is the sixth Hebrew letter.
J and W were added to the alphabet to represent sounds that were not needed
in greek.
Uri
I originally posted this to alt.usage.english on a similar question,
but it seems useful here, too. Please forgive any repetition.
——————–
From _Writing Systems_, by Geoffrey Sampson, Stanford Univ Press 1985:p.110
"The Latin approximants /j w/ developed into obstruents in the modern
Romance languages: Latin /ju:dikem/ ‘judge’, /wi:tam/ ‘life’ are
Italian /dz^udits^e/, /vita/, French /z^yz^/, /vi/. The double use of
V [Latin had only capital letters -jl] for /u v/ was inconvenient for
speakers of Germanic languages [like English - jl], which had a /w/
phoneme distinct from /v/, so in the +11c they began to indicate /w/
by writing V double; in due course VV ‘double /u/’, came to be seen
and written as in independent grapheme, W. In the +16c speakers of
Romance languages also found it awkward to use the same letters I V
both for vowels /i u/ and for very different consonants. The cursive,
minuscule form of capital V was <u>, so this was used to form a new
capital letter U while V gave a new minuscule <v>, thus splitting
V into two letters.
"Likewise, <I i> had swash allographs (cf. the medieval practice of
writing e.g. 13 as <xiij>, and these were elevated to the status of
a separate grapheme <J j>, whose English name /dz^eI/ is perhaps formed
by analogy with the adjacent K to avoid homonymy with the name of G.
(According to Updike (1922, vol.1 pp.22-3 n.2), the differentiation
of U, V, and W was not complete in England before the 19c.) It is
noteworthy that no less than five of our 26 letters, namely
F, U, V, W, Y, all descend ultimately from the same letter, wa:w, in
the Semitic ancestor-alphabet."
There’s more but I’ll spare you. This may help explain why the
"semi-vowel" letters are so confusing. They *are* confusing, and
have been for millenia.
Sampson is excellent on the Greco-Roman alphabet and Oriental
systems like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. A good reference,
available in paperback.
Hope this helps.
——————————————–
-John Lawler <jlaw…@umich.edu>
Linguistics Program University of Michigan
"..and, who knows? Maybe the horse will sing."
According to jlaw…@snoopy.ling.lsa.umich.edu (John Lawler):
> It is noteworthy that no less than five of our 26 letters, namely F, U,
V, W, Y, all descend ultimately from the same letter, wa:w, in the Semitic
ancestor-alphabet."
It think there’s a step missing here.
Our letter F comes from the Greek letter WAH (originally situated
between EPSILON and ZETA), which descended from the Semitic VAV. After
the Romans copied the alphabet from the Greeks, Greek dropped the letter
as a letter, but still used it as the numeral 6.
V, W, and Y are offshoots (as has been pointed out here recently) of U,
which comes from Greek UPSILON.
The missing step is showing that UPSILON came from Semitic VAV. I
always figured that the letters after TAU were made up by the Greeks,
and that they are not variants of other letters. (Though the similarity
between OMICRON ("little-O") and OMEGA ("big-O") is a little obvious.)
–=<*>=–
Totally beside-the-point comment on Greek numerals:
I’ve noticed that some manuscripts of the Greek New Testament have the
number 666 spelled out in The Revelation, but a few use Greek numerals:
CHI-Xi-WAH. Apparently, WAH has a few other names, such as DIGAMMA (from
its shape). "Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance" catalogs the numeral under
the spelled-out name "chi xi stigma". Yes: stigma.
–
—————————————————————————–
http://www.indirect.com/www/stevemac/ttt-hejmo.html
I want to be a non-conformist — just like all my friends!
—————————————————————————–
John Lawler (jlaw…@snoopy.ling.lsa.umich.edu) wrote:
: Sampson is excellent on the Greco-Roman alphabet and Oriental
: systems like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. A good reference,
: available in paperback.
Sampson may be excellent on the Greco-Roman alphabet
but he most certainly is not when it comes to Chinese,
Japanese, and Korean. See his article contra DeFrancis in
the number 1 of Linguistics 1994 and the rejoinder by
DeFrancis and me in number 3. DeFrancis’s Visible Speech
(1989) is a better starting point than Sampson 1983 for
those curious about writing systems, especially as concerns
the relationship between speech and writing.
J. Marshall Unger
University of Maryland
H Thygesen (edb…@find2.dbc.bib.dk) wrote:
: Anybody knows at what time J, W and Y where incorporated in the Latin
: alphabet ? What about AE (which is typed as one letter in Dansih and Norwegian
: and sometimes in latin words such as anaestisia ?)
: Helene
First part answered ad nauseam (I think anyway).
Just a slight correction: "anaesthesia" is a Greek word. The modern
greek would be:
anaisthe:sia (the "e:" is an attempt at "eta"), and "ai" is pronounced
"e" in l"e"tter).
A note: American English has respelt it as "anesthesia" (I don’t agree
but hey, what can a guy do?)
–
Corey A. Reid
e-mail: peab…@wam.umd.edu
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~peabody
Steve MacGregor (steve…@bud.indirect.com) wrote:
: According to jlaw…@snoopy.ling.lsa.umich.edu (John Lawler):
: > It is noteworthy that no less than five of our 26 letters, namely F, U,
: V, W, Y, all descend ultimately from the same letter, wa:w, in the Semitic
: ancestor-alphabet."
: It think there’s a step missing here.
: Our letter F comes from the Greek letter WAH (originally situated
: between EPSILON and ZETA), which descended from the Semitic VAV. After
: the Romans copied the alphabet from the Greeks, Greek dropped the letter
: as a letter, but still used it as the numeral 6.
: V, W, and Y are offshoots (as has been pointed out here recently) of U,
F,Y and V all come from the old Semitic VAV, among those three V is the
latecomer.Early alphabets were written among other things on stone
thus the straigh forms were the earlier ones. Een ater people used parchment
they still wrote on stone statues and such. V is a nuch more natural
form than U and therefore U must be an ofshoot of V.
The letter ordering is similar to the Semitic alphabet
HE – epsilon – e
/ F
VAV – - Y
\ V
ZAIN – zeta – Z
e and f kept their places, F could represent 6 as it was the sixth letter
V most accurately represents the VAV(/waw) sounds when used as a consonant.
and Z ‘migrated’ to the end of the alphabet.
:
: which comes from Greek UPSILON.
: The missing step is showing that UPSILON came from Semitic VAV. I
: always figured that the letters after TAU were made up by the Greeks,
: and that they are not variants of other letters. (Though the similarity
: between OMICRON ("little-O") and OMEGA ("big-O") is a little obvious.)
The letters after tav are
U V W X Y Z
U and V share a common origin, all of descended from the Semitic
VAV (V is basically a Y with the vertical line missing, Y is identical
in shape the old Semitic VAV. The word VAV is Hebrew for hook, or something
similar.
The most of these is the letter X.
It is generally acceptable that T is descended TAV (old Semitic)
both due to the similar sound, and the placement in the alphabet.
(BTW, Hebrew has a second t sounding letter, which didn’t make it
into the Latin alphabet)
Several curious points – Early Semitic Tav resembles X.
TAV in Hebrew means – a letter, a character, a mark – things
that seem not too far from the meaning we give X today.
X is probably also descended from TAV, only instead of the sound
it retained the shape and meaning.
X in English is a redundant letter, since its sound could be represented
by other letter (eks), it serves no useful purpose.
Originally it was pronounced differnetly, like the Hebrew HET (sound
does not exist in English - dutch G, Spanish J, the first consonant
of _chutspa_ etc.)
: –=<*>=–
: Totally beside-the-point comment on Greek numerals:
: I’ve noticed that some manuscripts of the Greek New Testament have the
: number 666 spelled out in The Revelation, but a few use Greek numerals:
: CHI-Xi-WAH. Apparently, WAH has a few other names, such as DIGAMMA (from
: its shape). "Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance" catalogs the numeral under
: the spelled-out name "chi xi stigma". Yes: stigma.
: —
: —————————————————————————–
: http://www.indirect.com/www/stevemac/ttt-hejmo.html
: I want to be a non-conformist — just like all my friends!
: —————————————————————————–
In article <3qhk8m$…@ilex.FernUni-Hagen.de>,
- Hide quoted text — Show quoted text -
Christian.Bruec…@FernUni-Hagen.de (Christian Bruecker) wrote:
> In article <smryanD9CBE8….@netcom.com>, smr…@netcom.com (Ahmed) says:
> [...]
> >J and V were originally just variants of I and U. In early latin there
> >was no difference between the sounds. Somewhere between then and now,
> >they did become distinct sounds and the letters eventually became distinct
> >as well.
> The original forms are I and V, J and U are later variants, derived from
> minuscles.
> They both stood for two different sounds in latin, namely for one vowel
> and one semi-consonant each.
> Later the different version were used to distinguish the sounds,
> so I and U were used for the vowel, J and V for the consonant,
> but with the exception that after G,Q U was also used for the consonant
> instead of V.
It’s slightly more complicated; <V> was used as a vowel (/u/), a consonant
(/w/), and as part of the digraphs <gu>, <qu>, which expressed the
phonemes /gw/, /kw/. The simple consonantal sound became [v] or similar in
later European
pronunciation, but the phoneme /kw/ remained [kw] in several European
countries, or simplified to [k]. Since the [w] of [kw] sounded more like
[u] than [v], it received the grapheme <u>. (In Germany of course, <qu>
is pronounced [kv], so it is evident that the Germans were not dominant in
setting up the modern convention.)
> >I don’t know why romans used QU instead CW like old english.
Because /kw/ was a separate phoneme.
> >Y came from
> >upsilon but I don’t know how or why.
Upsilon was first borrowed into Latin as V to mean /u/ and, secondarily, /w/.
When the Romans started borrowing Greek words with the later Athenian
pronunciation of upsilon as [y], they added a new form of the same letter
to their alphabet. Just to confuse you further, F also comes from the same
original Semitic letter…
> That’s because indoeuropean languages had two different "k"-sounds, (as
> semitic languages do have til today).
Semitic languages traditionally had a velar stop /k/ and a uvular stop
/q/. (The distinction is not universal in the modern languages, though it
is a feature of
educated versions of Arabic). The Indo-European protolanguage probably
distinguished a velar *k from a labiovelar *kw.
In the greek alphabet these two
> sounds were represented by kappa (hebrew "kaf") and a letter "koppa" (hebrew
> "qof") (between pi and rho, this letter later was replaced by kappa, but when
> using letters as number symbols still remained).
The Greeks had lost the Indo-European *kw-series (which merged with
labials, dentals or velars according to dialect and phonological context)
before the introduction of the alphabet. Kappa and koppa were used for the
same phoneme /k/, though I seem to remember that a spelling rule caused
koppa to be
preferred before back vowels- can anyone confirm?
>In latin the cognate to koppa
> is Q, the cognate to kappa is K, which was replaced by C (which is the
> cognate to gamma), so the pair C/Q in latin is a reflex of the difference
> between these to sounds (in the transscription of Arab, there the to
sounds are
> still distinguished, it’s used k and q, resp.)
The accounts I have read explain that in earlier Latin, Q was used before O,V,
C before E, I and K before A. The use of K declined, though it was never
entirely ousted from a few words. Elsewhere, the distinction between C
and Q developed until it matched the phonological distinction between /k/
and /kw/.
The use of <k> and <q> for modern transcriptions of Semitic is a learned
convention produced by people who know the history of the symbols, rather
than an indication that the distinctions being made are similar.
> In old english the two sounds
> had become the same, and therefore were equal written, both by C,
Old English still distinguishes the IE velar series (written <c>, <g>,
<h>) from the labiovelar series (<cw>, <w>, <hw>, to the best of my
recollection). I can’t remember however whether <cw> is to be analysed as
one unit or two – in the latter case the spelling convention would of
course be reasonable.
> while the
> consonant V (original QU was QV) in english is generally replaced by the
> "double V" W.
I’m not quite sure what this is supposed to express. English /w/, usually
written with a runic character in Old English, derives largely from IE *w.
The spelling with a double ‘u’, found also in Old High German, is an attempt to
distinguish /w/ from the ‘consonantal u’ of contemporary Latin and Romance
(namely [v]).
> Chris
Andrew.
> Totally beside-the-point comment on Greek numerals:
> I’ve noticed that some manuscripts of the Greek New Testament have the
> number 666 spelled out in The Revelation, but a few use Greek numerals:
> CHI-Xi-WAH. Apparently, WAH has a few other names, such as DIGAMMA (from
> its shape). "Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance" catalogs the numeral under
> the spelled-out name "chi xi stigma". Yes: stigma.
Reasonable enough considering that this letter was used as a ligature for
sigma+tau in medieval and early printed Greek.