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This week: The Lost Letter Edited by: Robert Waltz  
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May God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons - and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them; they run off - and how will you ever get control of them again!
-Nikos Kazantzakis
I've always thought of the T-shirt as the Alpha and Omega of the fashion alphabet.
-Giorgio Armani
Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.
-Richard Price |
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Everyone knows the English alphabet consists of 26 symbols known as "letters," including five or six vowels.
Like many things that "everyone knows," this is only partially correct.
Sure, there are 26 of the little buggers on our keyboards, but as we also know, there are symbols that aren't in the standard 26, including @, &, and punctuation marks. Those aren't generally put together with letters to form words, however.
As writers, we should know our language - and that includes aspects of its development, especially when we're writing about the past, or some version thereof - and it also helps to project this knowledge into the future; for example, into a world where communication is by, e.g., emojis.
Just as the alphabet added letters over time - most recently, letters like J / j and W / w - we've also lost some. And the one I want to talk about today is Þ / þ.
Apart from its usefulness in rendering pre-emoji keyboard expressions - :-Þ conveys a somewhat different tongue-sticking-out concept than does its counterpart with a P or p - this letter, known as thorn (or, unfortunately because of its similarity to 'p', þorn), is roughly equivalent to some uses of the consonant pair "th," or the Greek theta.
Now, to be honest, I'm unclear on where þ should go in the alphabet, and I'm entirely too lazy to look that up. For the purposes of our discussion today, though, it doesn't really matter - but it was a common letter as recently as Middle English, around the time movable type was getting going.
Now, one might ask, "Why did we need an entire letter to designate the 'th' sound when we have a perfectly good consonant pair to represent it?" Well, one might also ask why we need a c when an s or a k would do just as well, and be a lot less ambiguous. There doesn't have to be a reason; Greek certainly doesn't need one.
Or, one might also ask, "If this letter is so useful, why did it fall into disuse?" That one I can speculate on - not only is its original form similar to that of P / p, but in some written forms it bears an even greater similarity to the letter 'y'. This, by the way, is why you get business names like "Ye Olde Crumpet Shoppe." Along with the deliberately archaic spelling involved, the letter "Y" in "Ye" is actually a thorn, and so the word is pronounced exactly like "the" - because the word is, indeed, "the." As the ostensible purpose of written language is to facilitate, rather than hinder, communication, this was a problem.
So, probably to avoid confusion, 'þ' disappeared entirely from the English alphabet and almost entirely from use - though not from related alphabets such as Icelandic, which still uses some form of the letter. It is also possible that it fell into disuse because of the widespread use of Latin, which had no equivalent (thorn is derived from what the Romans considered barbarian languages).
It might be good, þough, to keep in mind þat þe letter used to exist, and þat similar letters do exist in different languages. Obviously, it's still accessible; oþerwise, I wouldn't have been able to type it in þis editorial. (For your information, þe capital letter can be accessed on a Windows keyboard wiþ Alt+0222, and the lower-case version wiþ Alt+0254 - in boþ cases, hold down þe Alt key while typing all þe digits on þe number pad.)
Okay, I'll stop using thorn for now.
Tolkien, for example, knew this. At least some of the languages of his creation included a "th" symbol. The point is, there is absolutely no reason why a fantasy (or science fiction) alphabet should include the standard English 26 letters, even if you're giving them different names or symbolic representations. Thorn is a real-world example of this, but one could also come up with other sounds represented by their own letter - imagine, for example, if every different sound that could be represented by "a" had its own graphical symbol. It would eliminate a lot of ambiguity. Or, perhaps, other consonant pairs would have their own representation, such as 'st,' 'sh' or the various pronunciations of 'ch.'
An alphabet that represents every possible sound would get unwieldy pretty fast, so best to use these sparingly. Still, consider it another tool in the box for writing - and not a thorn in your side. |
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Fantasy: November 22, 2017 Issue [#8610]
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