8. The Lost Letters of English

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 8.

The Lost Letters of English

Six characters that disappeared from English – and one that only changed its clothes

Imagine opening an English book that is a thousand years old. You will recognize a few words, but among them there will be characters that look like the letter p, the number 3 or a strangely stretched s. It is not a code. These are letters of English that gave way to more familiar spellings over the centuries. And some of them did not disappear without a trace.

When the Latin alphabet was not enough for English

The Anglo-Saxons used runes and later adopted the Latin script, which spread together with Christianity and learning. But the Latin alphabet was not designed for the sounds of Old English. So scribes took some letters from the runes, adapted others and used others in special combinations.

Today we are used to the 26 letters of the English alphabet. But in Old English we also find letters that a schoolchild would look for in vain in today's alphabet: thorn, eth, ash and wynn. Later yogh joined them, while the so-called long s was not a separate letter but another printed form of the familiar s.

Thorn and eth: two letters for today's th

The letter thorn (þ) comes from the runic tradition and eth (ð) was made by changing the Latin d. Both were used for the sounds that today's English writes as th, for example in thin and this. Some modern phonetic transcriptions have two different symbols, /θ/ and /ð/, but Old English scribes did not use thorn and eth to distinguish these two sounds consistently. They often switched between them out of habit and depending on the text.

In Middle English, the spelling th gradually took over. It was also influenced by scribal habits from the world of Norman French. Printing later helped to fix the new form, but the change did not start in the printing house – it was already under way in the age of manuscripts.

Did you know? — In Icelandic, Þ/þ and Ð/ð are still used today. So they disappeared from the modern English alphabet, not from every living language.

Why "Ye Olde" is not the old English "ye"

Do you know signs like Ye Olde Tea Shoppe? They are meant to create an old-fashioned atmosphere. You might think that ye was an old English word for "the". But there is a graphic trick here: the late handwritten form of the letter thorn sometimes looked like a small y. So the spelling that looks like ye on a sign today often meant þe historically – in other words, simply the.

Of course, the word ye also existed as a real historical pronoun. But the sign of an old-style pub tells a different story: people read the letter y where there once was þ. Pronouncing the sign as "yee old" is therefore a deliberate modern style, not a reconstruction of old English.

Ash: one letter we still recognize

The character æ was called ash and stood for a front vowel that students will recognize from the phonetic transcription of cat /kæt/. In Old English it was an ordinary letter; for example, dæg meant "day" and developed into today's day.

Æ disappeared from ordinary English spelling, but we still find it in historical and traditional spellings like encyclopædia, in some proper names and above all in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is a nice example of how a letter does not have to die completely – it can simply move into specialist writing.

Wynn: why is W actually "double U"?

In Old English writing, the sound /w/ was written with the letter wynn (ƿ), which may remind today's reader of a p. It was gradually pushed out by a spelling made of two u's or v's, uu or vv, which developed into today's w.

And this explains its strange English name: double u. It is not a mistake, even though today's printed w looks more like two vs. Historically, the forms u and v were not always as clearly separated as they are today.

Yogh: the letter that turned into gh, y and z

The character ȝ (yogh) spread mainly in Middle English. It came from an older insular form of the letter g and, depending on the word, the period and the region, it could stand for several different sounds. Sometimes its later successor is gh, sometimes y or g.

In Scotland, yogh looked like z in some manuscripts, and later scribes and printers replaced it with that letter. That is why, for example, the surname Menzies often has a traditional Scottish pronunciation roughly like "Mingis", not "Menzeez". And the historical spelling Zetland for Shetland came from a similar reading of the old character.

Be careful with the simple rule "yogh = gh": sometimes it works, but definitely not for all words. Modern spelling developed gradually and looked more like a tangled web than a single spelling reform.

Long s: why does an old book look as if it were full of f's?

When you read an old print, you may see forms like ſun or ſecond. The stretched ſ is called long s and, especially in the middle of a word, it looks like a small f, but without the full crossbar. It was not a different sound: it was still the sound /s/ and the same letter as today's s.

There used to be rules about when to use the long and when the short form of s. In English printing, the long s gradually disappeared around 1800. Readers lost one graphic puzzle without the pronunciation of a single word changing.

And two more letters that came late: J and V

While some characters were disappearing, today's alphabet was gaining new distinctions. In the past, i/j and u/v were often seen as variants of the same letter. Only in the early modern period did it become firmly established that j and v would have their own place and their own sound roles. So our modern alphabet is not an ancient unchanging law – it is one of the results of a long development of writing.

A small detective task: what changed and what stayed?

When you read an old text, it is worth asking two different questions: "Which letter do we write differently today?" and "Which sound was pronounced differently then?". They are not the same. With the long ſ, it was mainly the look that changed; with dæg → day, over the centuries not only the spelling but also the vowel changed. It is the combination of spelling and sound changes that explains why historical English is so surprising.

You can see this well in old family names too. Surnames do not move to new forms as quickly as ordinary words. So they often keep traces of forgotten scribal habits: the Scottish Menzies is a typical example. That is why the pronunciation of a name sometimes recalls a spelling that was abandoned long ago.

Can you read Old English?

Try this small experiment. Old English þæt corresponds to today's that; dæg means day; hƿæt corresponds to modern what (in older texts you may find several spelling variants). It is not a word-for-word conversion of the whole language; the point is that a different spelling can hide surprisingly familiar words.

Conclusion: the English alphabet as a palimpsest

The lost letters show that changes in English are not only a story of words and sounds. The way we write a language changes too. Sometimes an old letter is replaced by a pair of letters, sometimes it survives in a family name or in phonetic transcription. And when someone today sees "Ye Olde" and reads it as yee, they can for a moment become a victim of a medieval manuscript.