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Comment on People are just now finding out that there are 27 letters to the alphabet

deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

It’s & - ampersand aka “and per se and”. The article also mentions these:

lost letters include thorn (þ) – a soft “th” sound – and Wynn (ƿ), which was replaced by “uu”, before this was superseded by “w”. Ethel (Œ) – pronounced like the “oi” in “oil” – has also been lost, in favor of using vowel combinations to get the same job done. Yogh (ȝ) was briefly a way to denote the “ch” sounds, as found at the end of “loch”, but was soon abandoned, and the specific sound it denotes rarely used in English anymore.

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PenisWenisGenius@lemmynsfw.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Damn cancel culture really did a number on the English alphabet huh

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sxan@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I am totally adding þese back to my keybord.

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- pmk@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In that case also add ð. If you say the words “think” and “this” out loud, they use different “th”-sounds. “These” would be “ðese”, and “think” would be “þink”.
  
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  - ouRKaoS@lemmy.today ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Now I know how to say “ðese nuts” if I ever go time traveling!
    
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    Resol@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I wonder what nuts of the ðese variety taste like.
    
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  - DakRalter@thelemmy.club ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Wasn’t that a misconception and they both make either of those sounds?
    
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    sxan@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Did Old English not have both voiced and voiceless dental fricatives? Modern German has neither θ nor ð, and Old English sharing so much it wouldn’t surprise me, but O.E. obviously acquired or inherited them somewhere - was the voiced distinction introduced later? Probably not from Latin, since it didn’t have those either.
    
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    pmk@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I don’t know, that’s a level deeper than I know about, but you could be right.
    
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Resol@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Nouu I knouu uuhy it’s called “double U”.

Also, yogh looks too much like the Arabic numeral three, so it sort of makes sense why they got rid of it.

I believe Œ is still used in French (though it doesn’t count as part of the alphabet), but I just spell it as OE since it just looks so ugly. Æ looks way worse though, and Icelandic still uses it.

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