i was looking at my dictionary today and i started thinking about the differing sizes of indexes along the edge of the book. my question is: why is there more words in the dictionary that start with certain letters (like s or p), than words beginning with other letters (like x or y)?
im also curious if there is a similar phenomenon which occurs in other languages.
Just a guess, but a lot of our English words come all the way from Greek origins. And Greek didn’t have the letter Y. So words that originated in Greek won’t start with Y. [The lower-case letter gamma looks somewhat like our letter Y, but it is translated as the letter ‘g’.
Also, the letter X (chi) in Greek is translated as the ‘ch’ sound in English (as in Johanne Bach). Greek words that started with X were mostly converted to start with ch in English. (And there are a sizable number of such words in English.)
So there aren’t many words starting with these letters, since they didn’t exist back then.
But the other letters you mention, s sigma and p pi were common Greek letters, and a lot of words start with those letters.
Wouldn’t it be odd if the letters were exactly evenly distributed? Especially in English, where one letter can be or start several different phonemes: under the letter “C”, you have words starting with the /ch/, /k/, /s/ and /sh/ phonemes, you might expect the C section to be larger than the B and D sections, which have only one phoneme each.
Of course, many words start not with ‘x’ but with ‘ex’.
According to the poster on the wall of my high-school Latin classroom, only about 10% of English words are of Greek origin. A full 40% are of Latin origin, which did have both letters.
I don’t have a Greek dictionary handy, but I think there are very few greek words that begin with X (chi).
Actually, there’s a fair number of English words derived from Greek words beginning with chi. The thing is, most of them are spelled with a ch- (e.g. Christ, chlorine, choreography). But there are also a few that begin with x- (e.g. xenon, xylem, xanthophyll).
The main reason few words begin with X is that few began with it in Latin. My small Latin-English dictionary has a grand total of 7 entries under X and two of those are names.
It’s kind of an unusual letter in that it represents two sounds. Those two sounds did not occur together at the beginning of Latin words. Nor English words.
Someone else said that Greek did not have the letter Y. That’s not quite true. Y was not in the Latin alphabet, but was used by the Romans to translate the Greek letter upsilon. Latin did have a y-sound, but they use the letter I to represent it.
The letter “W” is almost totally unused in French, and the few French words that begin with “w” are mostly English imports.
Not many words came from Greek. Well over half of English’s vocabulary comes from Latin, but most frequently-used words are of Germanic origin.
Some sounds are more common than others, and this is true in any language. The letters corresponding to those sounds thus appear less frequently. The /ks/ sound that x usually describes just isn’t that common in English compared to other sounds.
In Spanish, e is the most frequently-used letter (as in English) and (aside from k and w which are only used in foreign words) x is again the least frequent letter. It’s just the way it happens.
I think you’re all barking up the wrong tree with the Greek letter chi. Sure, it looks like an X, but it’s pronounced “kh”. The Greek letter “x” is xi, which looks like Ξ (upper case) and ξ (lower case).
Hence our words “xenon”, “xenophobia” etc derive from the Greek ξενος (xenos) meaning “strange”.
More precisely there wre two different forms of ancient Greek. In Western Greek the letter chi which looks like our X was pronounced ks like our English X usually is. In Eastern Greek the letter Xi which looks like Ξ (upper case) and ξ (lower case) was pronounced ks while the letter chi (X) was pronounced like the ch in Bach.
The Etruscans, and then the Romans, borrowed the alphabet from the closer Western Greeks giving us a ks sound for our X letter. Eastern Greek developed into what we think of as Classical Greek giving them the ch sound. When Eastern Greek words were later adopted into Latin chi was transliterated as ch.