Missing Letters

No, this is not a post about absentee landlords.

OK, two resolutions for the new year. First, post more on Word du Jour, second, stop the crap jokes. Anyone care to take bets on which one collapses first?

The idea for this post comes from my curiosity about why the name Dalziel is pronounced ‘Dee-ell’ in English. On my way to uncovering this mystery, I was reminded of other things, and thought “hello, why not make a post of it?” So here it is, a small introduction to some letters formerly used in the English alphabet. In truth, the alphabets vary from Saxon to Middle English to (mainly) Old English, but if you don’t mind me mixing and matching, I’ll continue.

Yogh

To begin, then, a description of the Dalziel/Dee-ell  problem. The culprit is the Old English letter ‘Yogh’. Written like this: Ȝ (or lowercase ȝ). Old English employed the yogh as a ‘g’ sound, borrowing it from Anglo-Saxon, as a ‘modern’ transliteration of a rune – Gyfu – used to represent the soft and hard ‘g’ sounds in the original Germanic. By the time yogh got to Middle English, its remit had been expanded to encompass the sounds of several letters – notably G, J, I, W and sometimes X, depending on context. This was all well and good, as most people understood the rules, but one big problem stood out. Yogh looked vey similar to the way the letter Z could (and can still be) written in cursive lowercase script. Still, no problem, you might think. Except that about this time people like Caxton and Guttenberg spoiled things by beginning to print things. Typesetters of the day often did not have the correct character for yogh (and other letters), partly because the Normans found the use of non-Latin characters annoying, and replaced them whenever possible with whatever they felt appropriate. In the case of yogh, the Latin Z was deemed the most useful substitution, most likely because of the similarity with cursive yogh.

For this reason, a handful of words and names still exist with the replacement Z standing in for the yogh. ‘Menzies’ is one such name, and should, apparently, be pronounced ‘ming-iss’. The G is intoned as in ‘singing’ not as in ‘linger’.  However, care should be taken to add a Y sound to the end of the G in order to properly recreate the Middle English way of saying it. The end product should be something like ‘ming(y)-iss. The Scots surname Mackenzie used to be pronounced ‘Mackenyie’, and sometimes still is. Other examples include Finzean (roughly, fing(y)-ean), Glenzier (gling(y)-er) and, of course, Dalziel. British readers may be surprised to find that the country-wide newsagents chain John Menzies prefers the old pronunciation, and have a little ditty on their web site to help you remember:

A lively young damsel named Menzies
Inquired: “Do you know what this thenzies?”
Her aunt, with a gasp,
Replied: “It’s a wasp,
And you’re holding the end where the stenzies.”

Thorn and Wynn

Not to be confused, but rather lumped together in this description in the hope of differentiating them. The problem is that Thorn (written: Þ or lowercase þ), looks very similar to Wynn (Ƿ, lowercase ƿ or runic ᚹ), especially if your handwriting is as bad as mine.

There’s not much in the way of a back story to wynn (or ‘wen’, as it is sometimes pronounced and spelled). In very early versions of Old English, the letter and sound (or phoneme) we now know as W was represented by the letter ‘uu’. For some reason, scribes of the time decided that this was not a good idea, and that it would be far better to use the old rune ᚹ instead. History does not relate why they thought this was such a brilliant plan, but it does recall that by the time we arrived at Middle English, the idea had been dropped and ‘uu’ made a comeback, to be replaced later by W.

Thorn, however, has quite a funky history, and is still used in the Icelandic alphabet even today. Hey – if it’s good enough for Björk, it’s good enough for me. A strange history, really. Thorn began as a transliteration of the runic letter thorn (or thurs), representing the soft and hard ‘th’ sounds (the sounds produced in ‘this’ and ‘the’, for example). Over time, via Old English and Middle English, and later into the ‘modern’ English of the 17th and 18th centuries, it started to look a lot like wynn, and from there became corrupted so far as to resemble a Y.

The interesting upshot of this transformation is that all European printers had a Y in their typefaces, but not all had a thorn, so Y became the de facto standard replacement character for thorn. If you ever wondered why you see ‘Ye Olde iPod Shoppe’ when businesses are trying to be quaint (and failing, in my opinion), it’s because of the old thorn character. ‘Ye’ should properly be pronounced ‘the’, as the thorn is replaced by a Y, but is almost always pronounced ‘yee’, either in jest or because the user is unaware (as was I before I began researching this). There are so many yings I still don’t know.

Eth

Eth or edh (Ð or ð lowercase) was seldom used, even in Old English, when it was supposed to represent ‘th’. “But wait, what about thorn?”, I hear you cry. Yes, the reason it wasn’t heavily used is because thorn was already doing the job of TH, and having more than one way of writing it must have been a pain for scribes all over the country. The thorn was generally the most used and became standard, up to its demise early in the 16th century. The eth still exists in the Icelandic language, and still represents what English speakers would describe as a ‘th’ sound.

Wikipedia reliably informs me that eth can also be used in mathematical notation to denote a partial derivative, explaining it thus: “a partial derivative of a function of several variables is its derivative with respect to one of those variables, with the others held constant”. If you’re feeling particularly suicidal, you may read the whole article here.

Long S

This often confuses people, and not without good reason. If it’s any consolation, the people who used to use this letter were probably as confused as you about it. Long S (written as ſ or ſ ), seems to have many and varied rules regarding it usage. There seems to have been much advice available about when and where to use the long s correctly, but most of it appears to have been conflicting. A good rule of thumb is that the long s was used at the beginning or in the middle of a word, but never at the end. Furthermore, in the case of a double s, the first was long and the second ‘short’. It seems people were contriving to complicate the issue and succeeding.

The problem, of course, is that long s looked quite like a lowercase ‘f’, especially as some writers liked to attach a backward-facing nub to make it look even more f-like. This made for comedy gold in later years, some of the more innocent exponents of such mirth being Flanders and Swann in this typical monologue: “Kydd took the scroll, unrolled it – it rolled up again, they always did. Unrolled it again – at the bottom were several rows of very square highly illuminated notes, and at the top it said Greenfleeves. Kyd looked at it and thought “Well this is a pretty unlikely title for a fong”.

The long s still survives as a mathematical symbol denoting an integral. Now, it’s no good asking me about any of this, because I’m a total duffer at maths. All I could gather from what seemed like hours of research is that it had something to do with the relationship to the Greek symbol used for sumnation, sigma (Σ). If anyone can explain what I’m missing in words I can understand, please post a comment.

Invaluable in my research has been the quite marvellous blog Babel Stone, visit it if you get a chance, it is truly a place of wonder.

I hope you enjoyed reading this little missive. If you enjoyed it, tell your friends. If not, tell me. Not that it will change anything.

Oh, and a happy new year to both my readers.

Tom.