What character was removed from the alphabet? (2020)

[Symbiote]

I thought this would be about Old→Middle→Modern English, in which case the lost letters are Ƿ, ð, þ and æ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Alphabet

[EA-3167]

I think it's interesting that despite our access to this sort of information, a huge number of people still don't understand that "Ye Olde" was not pronounced "Yee" and rather "The".

[mathieuh]

Also yogh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh

There’s a politician in the UK called Menzies Campbell, his name is pronounced “mingis” because that “z” actually used to be a yogh

[toastal]

ESL learners would probably appreciate the visual split between voiced ð & voiceless þ from the th digraph that isn’t a dental fricative (e.g. Thailand, Thomas, Thames). With such a reform we could replace “the” with standalone “ð” which would bring symmetry with the single-character indefinite article, “a”.

[ignoramous]

Well, Ƿ & þ are covered in a separate article: https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-alphabet/

[dagmx]

They mention those with links at the bottom of this article as well

[ljlolel]

Also from op site: https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-alphabet/

[paulkrush]

"It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” So, the students said, “and per se and.” Per se means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.” The term per se was used to denote letters that also doubled as words, such as the letter I (for “me”) and A. By saying “per se,” you clarified that you meant the symbol and not the word.

Over time, “and per se and” was slurred together into the word we use today: ampersand."

[kokanee]

I’ve heard some people say that as a child they thought the letter before P was “Elemeno.” So it certainly tracks that if you ask kids to recite “and per se and” that they might think the whole phrase is the name of the letter.

[asciimov]

I have seen this explanation printed so many times, and unattributed, that I wonder if students of that era actually said "and per se and".

[atdrummond]

The reason I’m inclined to accept this narrative is that not only have I not seen any plausible alternative etymology, there is no alternative etymology available period.

[caturopath]

A and I used to sometimes get 'per se' to clarify that people were referring to the letter, not the one-letter word

[throwaway894345]

Yep, I learned this from the History of English podcast. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes this sort of trivia about the evolution of English.

[behnamoh]

And here I thought ampersand had something to do with Ampere, the unit of electric current…

[mcdonje]

"&" wasn't ever in the alphabet in the same capacity as the letters that represent sounds. It was there as a keyword signifying the end of the list. Then its name was expanded to clarify that it was not a normal letter but a keyword. Then that expanded name was misinterpreted by people who never needed the list termination signifier to begin with.

Lesson? KISS. They should've implemented it with brackets.

[saalweachter]

What, you don't use & in your everyday spelling of words? &, b&, c&le, d&y, gr&, p&a, r&om, v&al, w&er...

[naikrovek]

> It was there as a keyword signifying the end of the list.

as opposed to simply not continuing the list, or using the word "end" somewhere? this doesn't make sense, to me. I find it difficult to believe this.

[dagmx]

Really they should have had a null. Create extra havoc with C strings if null had the need to be a common char

[jmclnx]

When I was very young, I remember AE being used in various printed materials (school books).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%86

But by the time I was in High School it seemed to have disappeared.

[ZeroGravitas]

You may have been taught using the briefly popular ITA system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet

http://s320709369.onlinehome.us/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/f...

[opello]

"AE" as you have it (with your link presumably you mean Æ) is the letter "ash" from the Old English alphabet.

Þ called "thorn" is another, which type setters replaced with a Y so as to not add another letter to their collections. It made the "th" sound and why "Ye Olde ..." is a spelling convention but people of the time would never have said "yee" for it.

Other letters were lost too, eth, wynn, and this is all contributes to why Modern English spelling conventions are kind of awful for ESL learners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

[bombcar]

The advent of the standard typewriter and computer keyboard killed many a special letter/ligature.

[kzrdude]

The british spelling is supposedly encyclopædia and Britannica still seems to use it (with and without ae = æ ligature).

[version_five]

We still see this in French semi-regularly, such as œil and cœur

[beardyw]

Ah, mondegreen

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen

I remember the Maxell tape ads (ibid) "Me ears are alight".

https://youtu.be/XEe0qqPAC6E

[UncleSlacky]

"Beelzebub has a devil for a sideboard"

[sjcsjc]

The girl with colitis goes by

[chrischen]

In the classic alphabet song & comes between Y and Z. It’s been hiding there all this time.

[blacksmith_tb]

I naively thought to be "part of the alphabet" our ancestors would have needed to, you know, use "&" in words - the article weakly hints at this for "&c" as being equivalent to "etc" (saving keystrokes even before they had keyboards, I guess). But given that they didn't, say, write "sand" as "s&" I will politely refuse to accept it as a letter.

[no_identd]

[Laughs in Laughing in b& & v&]

[weinzierl]

I always thought amper was another word for merchant because in my native German the & symbol is called "Kaufmanns-Und", literally "merchants-and".

[hirundo]

This was good planning, if it was still part of the alphabet we couldn't use it for an URL query parameter delimiter.

[version_five]

I think it's too bad that we didn't choose delimters that had no chance of appearing in actual text. Commas are a big one, when parsing csv there's always the problem of having commas in the text of a field. One hack I have used if I don't want to delete them is to swap them for a character I imagine will never be in the text, such as | (pipe). It all could have been avoided if we had some standard delimiters that were not part of common text.

[WarOnPrivacy]

In the early 1970's, I saw the & appear in some of our older alphabet books. The absolutist child in me tried to work out if that bit of archaic data was authoritative or not.

Those books were likely printed in the 1950s.

[GloomyBoots]

A few years ago I was idly thumbing through old books at a used store. Looking over a remedial arithmetic book, I was surprised to find that they referred to zero as “the cipher”. Exponentiation and the process of finding a square root were “involution” and “evolution”, respectively. My math education was pretty ad-hoc (complicated story), so maybe these are better known than I realize, but I’ve never heard them. I ended up grabbing the book just for the vocabulary. These examples are just the ones that jumped out most in the first couple of pages.

[arek_nawo]

Never would I have thought that "&" was ever part of an alphabet. It's more of a symbol, like "." or ";". HN is sometimes a source of curious things.

[justin_oaks]

I was hoping this article would be about the letter C and be from the future.

The letter C is useless. It either makes the sound that S does or the sound K does. Instead of C we should just use an S or a K for every place a C is.

Some may argue that without C we wouldn't have CH. And then I say, "Why do we need two characters to represent a single sound? It should have it's own letter."

Alas, English spelling is all kinds of messed up. And I'll have to resign myself to that fact.

[qqtt]

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.

The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

[xattt]

C is also used for sounds that sound like “ts”; you can’t make that sound with an s or k alone.

Sidenote: I see that some transliteration systems make Q represent “ch”.

[franciscop]

I keep saying that, by chance, it's a pity that the English alphabet has exactly 23 letters and doesn't have a single one more. Had it one more letter, say "ñ" or "ç" or some other, that'd make it perfect for base64: 24*2 + 10 = 64. Instead now we have 62 "base" alphanumeric alphabet, and two symbols that are disagreed upon since they have to be chosen depending on the context.

[smeej]

Wait, here I've been thinking the alphabet has 26 letters all this time?

(double checks keyboard)

[franciscop]

Edit: I mistakenly wrote 23 _now in this post_ while I've had this thought many times with the correct alphabet number count, 26. In fact my math above only works for 26 (or 27 if it had one more letter).

[NelsonMinar]

The alternate question is "why are these 26 characters the American English alphabet?" It's fairly arbitrary, a collection of historical accidents and changes in orthography.

And it's incomplete. You can't really write American English with just the usual 26 letters. Ñ and the ʻokina are proper letters and necessary for writing a bunch of American words correctly. The various kahakō are helpful too but they are treated as diacritics and not full fledged separate letters.

[4cao]

I was expecting this would be about the letter Ⱶ or one of the other Claudian letters of the Latin alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudian_letters

[markwalllberg]

In the early 1800s, school children reciting their ABCs concluded the alphabet with the &.

It would have been confusing to say “X, Y, Z, and.” So, the students said, “and per se and.” Per se means “by itself,” so the students were essentially saying, “X, Y, Z, and by itself and.”

So it was just some shorthand tossed in there

[paulkrush]

I think of Hacker News as a source of interesting things that I as a nerd, did not know & this fits.

[JoeAltmaier]

OP says 'per se' means 'by itself'. But in this case (the alphabet song) it makes more sense for 'per se' to have it's other meaning: 'as such'. That is, the letter means the same as 'and'.

[kazinator]

Q: What character was removed from the alphabet?

A:

   1> (diff (range #\a #\z) "the alphabet")
   (#\c #\d #\f #\g #\i #\j #\k #\m #\n #\o #\q #\r #\s #\u #\v #\w
    #\x #\y #\z)

Plus all all non-alphabetic characters other than space.

[anotherhue]

Ever wondered about those old 'U's that look like V?

Now you know why 'W' is so named.