Obsolete letters

The article that follows will not, perhaps, be of much interest or use except to those studying English Literature or History - or for some other reason trying to read medieval texts. But those with a curious mind and an interest in language may find that it passes an entertaining and instructive few minutes. A fair amount of it is owed to Henry Bradley, 1916's article on 'Shakespeare's English', in E.K. Chambers, 1916 and to David Crystal's Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language - modern readers may find helpful web-sites.

• Up to about the Norman conquest, Anglo-Saxon scribes used four 'extra' (non-Latin) letters to help write down characteristic sounds of that very Germanic language.
  • Two of these continued till about 1500. These were the thorn, (upper case Þ; lower case þ) and the yogh (u.c. Ȝ; l.c. ȝ).
    • Thorn should not be confused with either 'p' or 'y' in modern fonts: it is a letter that looked about half way between a 'P' and a 'Y'. In different Microsoft fonts, you may be able to see the resemblances - and the small but real differences - between the modern 'p, P' and thorn. Thorn stood for the sound nowadays represented by 'th', in its unvoiced form, as in 'think', 'throat' and 'bath'.

This letter has been mis-read in modern times as 'y', giving marketing people the word 'ye' ('antique'), as in Ye olde tea shoppe. This is simple ignorance. The word should be represented in modern English as 'the' (and the phrase as 'the old tea shop', which might not look so 'good').

• • Confusingly, another archaic letter, (Ƿ ƿ known as wynn) resembles both 'thorn' and 'p'.
    • Wynn is the equivalent of the modern 'W', and is derived from its namesake in the runic alphabet.

The other letter in use till the sixteenth century was the 'yogh', Ȝ, which stood mostly for a guttural ('throaty') sound rather like the modern German 'ch', as in 'ich' - only further back in the throat. (This is often shown in modern English spelling by the 'ghost' letters 'gh' - which now have no sound at all in words like 'night', 'ought' and 'weight'; but which were sounded in Middle and Old English .) Sometimes the yogh was used instead of 'z', which is very confusing! In Scots, it was used for the nasal 'ng' sound IPA: /(/ŋ/)/ in names like 'Menzies', traditionally pronounced 'MINGiez' IPA: /ˈmˈɪŋ ɪs/), and 'MacKenzie' (' m'cKINGie' IPA: /m^ə ˈkɪŋ ɪ/.

• The two letters that died out of use in normal written English shortly after the eleventh century began were,
  • the 'aesc', Æ (minuscule: æ), a digraph of a and e which represented a characteristic Anglo-Saxon vowel. (This symbol is still used in the IPA to represent the vowel of 'that', 'cat' and 'sat', and in some North Germanic languages.)
  • The last of the Anglo-Saxon obsolete letters is the 'eth' or 'edh', Ð, l.c. ð, which represents the voiced version of the 'th' sound, as in 'that', 'then' and 'breathe'.

As well as actually different letters, our ancestors used some letters in different ways from the way we use them now. Well into the seventeenth century, this was true particularly of two groups of letters, 'j/i/y' and 'u/v'.

In sixteenth century printing, the two letters 'i' and 'y' were virtually interchangeable, the choice of one over the other being largely a matter of the printer's whim - or how much space he wanted to fill. Both were used to indicate the vowels in any word, without much insistence on any rule of spelling. The modern word 'daily', for example, could be given as dailie, dailye, or daylie - and any other variation. The consonant that we now call consonantal 'y' (IPA: /j/) was usually written or printed with a 'y'. This was not true of the consonant that we call 'j'. This seems to have been thought of simply as a long form of 'i', and the letter 'i' was much more commonly used for both the vowel and the consonant ('j' was sometimes called 'tailed i', and both were thought of as consonants). This gives such forms as iustice for modern 'justice', iuyce ('juice') Iulius ('Julius') and Iames ('James'). The difference between 'i' and 'j' was mostly aesthetic. The printer chose whichever he preferred the look of in that word: most printers never used 'j'. ('j' was used, as a form of flourish, in handwriting and printing, to mark the last 'I' of a Roman numeral - iiij for example was the usual Elizabethan way of writing '4', and 'xij' of '12'.)

With 'u', which in modern times is a vowel, and 'v' which is now a consonant, 'v' was used for either in Elizabethan printing - as long as it came at the beginning of the word. There are such words as 'vs', 'vp' and 'vnto', as well as 'vtter'. Otherwise, either sound was represented by the letter 'u', giving such words as 'giue', sauage' and 'caruing'. There are also spellings that seem very confusing to the modern eye, like viuid and reuiue. (The letter that we call 'double u' was printed by taking two of the letter 'v' - VV - so it should have been called, as the French and Italians still call it, 'double vee', not 'double-you'.) Up to the eighteenth century, according to McArthur (1992), both 'u' and 'v' were considered to be vowels, and 'v' was sometimes called 'pointed u'.

There was also a peculiarity about which some people still joke. The letter 's' had two forms, until the end of the eighteenth century. There was the form that still survives, the 'short s'. This was used at the ends of words. Elsewhere, the more elegant long 's' or ſ was used. This looks very like the letter 'f', only with a half-sized crossbar. This resemblance was probably why it ceased to be used: it is also the cause of much humour among students of older texts, who are amused to sound all 's' letters written in the long form as if they were 'f's. (Have another look at a 'long s' and an 'f', in the Lucida Sans Unicode font: ʃ and f.) Now you know why some schoolboy students of literature refer to 'Mafter William Fakfpeare, and love to quote his song that starts (or, 'His ſong that ſtarts' - notice that the final letter is a short 's' - Where the bee sucks, there suck I.

This is the letter that Germans use to represent two 's's in double form as ß - a single letter, written with a long 's' immediately followed by a short 's', as in the traditional German way of writing the word for 'street', strasse: straße. This letter is known as the scharfes s ('sharp s'), or Es-zet ('s-z'), in German.