so you missed the spoiler box, then?
Not disagreeing, but I did once run across a Latin pangram[*] that had only 20 different letters and K wasn’t one of them. It had all of our letters except J, K, U, W, Y, and Z.
[*] A pangram is a text that contains all the difference letters. This sentence was used as an exercise for students to practice writing. The Latin equivalent of “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, which I remember having to type many times in typing class.
That was a good video, thanks.
The whole evolution of the alphabet is too complicated to go into here, but I just wanted to point out that K and Q come from two distinct letters in Semitic alphabets. In Hebrew they are kaph and qoph, representing the front and back versions of the stop. Roughly, the sounds of keep and cool. English speakers don’t even hear the difference, but the sounds are really different. But since they are entirely dependent on the following vowel, there can be no minimal pair.
It’s fun to go to Iceland, where they kept those letters in their alphabet but it otherwise looks like English.
Of course it’s fun to go to Iceland, period.
What do you mean by, “entirely dependent on the following vowel”? They seem to just be two different consonants. Compare the words כָּרָה vs קָרָה, כֵּן vs קֵן, etc
I think he meant that in English, they are dependent on the following vowel.
That’s what I meant. In Hebrew they are distinct, but native English speakers are not even aware they are different.
Yes, but not necessarily in that order.
The representation is so loose, in fact, that what @Jim_B wrote was pretty much just as correct as what you wrote. Some letters represent phonemes, some represent phones (individual sounds), some represent combinations of phonemes, some represent entire words, some don’t represent any sound at all (but may serve to modify the pronunciation of other letters), and some can be used for several of these purposes depending on the context. (I’m speaking about alphabets in general here, though most of these cases are found in Modern English.)