Where is the English alphabet defined? And more

[BMalion]

maybe it’s finally time for the DECABET!

[Ludovic]

BM, I wonder how long this thread will remain lmnopen.

[Placid_Liver]

Thank you CwG

[CookingWithGas]

@XAPПO MAPXC

I don’t think this was ever true. I need a cite.

I don’t think & was considered a proper “letter” but it was recited by schoolchildren as part of the alphabet as “and per se and,” which they corrupted to “ampersand” and the name stuck.

[Alive_At_Both_Ends]

Originally Posted by XAPПO MAPXC

Don’t you mean XAPПO MAPKC?

[BMalion]

I’m LMNOpen to the idea.

[CookingWithGas]

@Alive At Both Ends

Don’t you mean XAPПO MAPKC?

Dang. Right you are. :smack:

[DSYoungEsq]

@CookingWithGas

I don’t think & was considered a proper “letter” but it was recited by schoolchildren as part of the alphabet as “and per se and,” which they corrupted to “ampersand” and the name stuck.

I doubt this apocryphal story, which I note is repeated unattributed at Wikipedia. The ampersand was sometimes included in attempts at letter ordering, and in some was put at the end after “z,” but it would take something more than an unattributed recital of this cute story to convince me that the name came about that way. Perhaps Samclem could enlighten us.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@DSYoungEsq

I doubt this apocryphal story, which I note is repeated unattributed at Wikipedia. The ampersand was sometimes included in attempts at letter ordering, and in some was put at the end after “z,” but it would take something more than an unattributed recital of this cute story to convince me that the name came about that way. Perhaps Samclem could enlighten us.

You’re right to doubt it, because the story is garbled in CwG’s cite. Here’s Morris on the situation:

http://www.word-detective.com/052003.html#ampersand

The name “ampersand” certainly sounds as if it should mean something terribly exotic, coined in the misty yesteryear of typography, but its roots are actually quite humble, and we have the long-suffering schoolchild to thank for the word. It comes from the practice once common in schools of reciting all 26 letters of the alphabet plus the “&” sign, pronounced “and,” which was considered part of the alphabet, at least for learning purposes.

Any letter that could also be used as a word in itself (“A,” “I,” “&” and, at one point, “O”) was preceded in the recitation by the Latin phrase “per se” (“by itself”) to draw the students’ attention to that fact. Thus the end of this daily ritual would go: “X, Y, Z and per se and.” This last phrase was routinely slurred to “ampersand” by children rightly bored to tears, and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.

The ampersand symbol itself, the “&,” while devilishly hard to draw by hand, becomes much less mysterious when revealed as a stylized rendition of the Latin word “et,” meaning, of course, “and.” Finally, it’s interesting to note that proofreaders reading copy aloud to one another (as I can attest based on a spell spent as a proofreader) pronounce the ampersand symbol “et” to distinguish it from the actual word “and.”

Although & was in the recitation, it was distinct and distinguished from the recognized 26 letters.

As for the Cyrillic misspelling - heck, people around here can’t get it right in the Latin alphabet.

[dtilque]

@Giles

In Latin, it had 23 letters – A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z – and the lower case form of V is u.

It’d possibly be more accurate to say that Latin had only 20 letters. K was rarely used. In fact, the only Latin word I know of that had it is kalends and even that was often spelled with a C. Y and Z were only used for words borrowed from Greek. I’ve seen a Latin pangram (sentence containing all the letters) that did not have K, Y and Z.

Z was an interesting case. Latin inherited it from Etruscan which got its alphabet from Greek, but dropped it because the sound does not occur in Latin. Several centuries later, it was added because they’d borrowed a handful of Greek words that had it. It originally was towards the beginning of the alphabet like the Greek zeta, but was added at the tail end.

[Bytegeist]

@Chronos

& is a stylized way of writing the letters “et”. . . . I’ve heard of medieval texts which used & whenever the letters e and t appeared together.

Care to make a b& ?

Never mind, you’re probably right. Forg& about it.

By the way, speaking of the Alphabet Song . . . does anyone know if Russians or Greeks have songs to go along with their alphabets?

[DSYoungEsq]

“K” also was taken from the Greeks (Kappa). However, it wasn’t used hardly at all because the Romans had a perfectly good letter to use for the sound already, namely “C.”

As for the Alphabet Song, it is worth noting that the possibly apocryphal story about the origin of “ampersand” doesn’t say it came at the end of the Alphabet Song, but rather was recited at the end of an alphabet teaching pattern where you started with “A is for apple, B bought it, C cut it, …” According to the story, you didn’t have anything to do with X, Y, and Z, so you simply said, “X, Y, Z and per se and, …” and then added some sort of rhyming phrase to finish it off.

I still want to hear what Samclem has in the way of info on this…