Lost Letters

Building blocks of society that faded through time

by C McBarnett, Year 8

Letters. Perhaps the most important part of any language, they form each and every word that we use today. They’re dependable and necessary for word forming, but what about the ones that don’t make an appearance in modern times?

Written communication first started 4,000 years ago when the Egyptians started to use logo-syllabaries (using pictures to represent words), which we would know as hieroglyphics. Over time, these pictures became symbols to represent sounds rather than entire words. As Christianity spread through Europe, the Latin alphabet took the place of the runic alphabet which had previously been used by the Anglo-Saxons in England and in many other Germanic countries.

If you were to try and read works from about 1,000 years ago, it would be near impossible to understand its meaning. For example, here is the Lord’s Prayer in Old English compared to in modern English:

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum; si þin nama gehalgod to becume þin rice gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.

Which translates to: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven.

Some letters, such as Þ (thorn), ƿ (wynn), ȝ (yogh, not a three) and ð (eth) were made from old Runic letters but these did not survive into the alphabet of modern English. The Latin alphabet, although replacing the runic one, read as:

This meant that G, J, U, W and Y were missing. The letters wynn and yogh became the letters we know today as Y and G. However, the symbols thorn and eth are no longer used in Modern English, although they can be found in languages such as Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

Reports disagree about the number of missing letters and it ranges anywhere between twelve and five. It’s been an interesting project to research a few of these missing letters. I’d like to share three of my favourites with you:

The first letter I have chosen is the thorn (Þ or þ), which stood for the unvoiced dental fricative of ‘th’ - such as in ‘with’. Italian and German typewriters, which did not have the symbol for a thorn, used ye to represent the thorn’s symbol, which led to the misconception that people said ‘ye old…’ but the ‘ye’ actually for ‘the’ therefore it would be said the same way as being written ‘the old…’. Sorry to burst your Old English bubble, but it’s true.

Secondly, wynn (Ƿ or ƿ). Wynn was used by English scribes because, as I mentioned earlier, there was no ‘W’ in the Latin alphabet. The scribes found the ‘uu’ shape of a double-u too hard to write, and so the wynn was proposed. However, people stuck to using the original ‘uu’ format, and the ‘w’ we know today was formed.

Lastly, eth (Ð or ð). Eth had the same meaning of a thorn, but yet a different kind of thorn. Eth was a symbol for using the voiced dental fricative, such as in ‘thud’, or the first symbol in feather. Like thorn, eth’s use declined steadily until it was no longer used.

I hope you too will agree that each letter has its own story to tell despite its loss of use in our modern alphabet and society. Societal Evolution