History of the Alphabets - Sounds - (My Notes)

 This is a side note to the larger project of noting down the History of English.

1. The Etruscan language had no ‘b’ sound, no ‘d’ sound, and no ‘g’ sound. Linguists call these sounds ‘voiced stops’ and apparently Etruscan did not use voiced stops at all in the language. Now there are unvoiced versions of these sounds. The unvoiced version of ‘b’ is ‘p.’ And the unvoiced version of the ‘d’ sound is the ‘t’ sound. And the unvoiced version of the ‘g’ sound is the ‘k’ sound. And the Etruscan language had all of these unvoiced sounds – the ‘p’ sound, the ‘t’ sound, and the ‘k’ sound. Remember that the third letter in Greek was gamma and it had the ‘g’ sound. So the third letter ‘gamma’ was pronounced by the Etruscans with a ‘k’ sound because they didn’t have a ‘g’ sound. And that is ultimately how the Romans inherited it. And that is why the third letter became the modern letter C in Latin and was used to represent the ‘k’ sound just as the Etruscans had used it.

But whereas the Etruscans didn’t have a ‘g’ sound, the Romans did have a ‘g’ sound. So they eventually had to create a new letter for the ‘g’ sound which became the Roman letter G. And that is why the uppercase C and the uppercase G resemble each other. 

And there was also a reason why the new letter G was placed in the seventh position after the letter F. The seventh letter of the Etruscan alphabet had the ‘Z’ or ‘zed’ sound which the Etruscans had borrowed from the Greeks. But unlike Greek and Etruscan, early Latin didn’t have the ‘z’ or ‘zed’ sound. So the seventh letter – called ‘zay’ by the Etruscans – was unnecessary in Latin. So the early Romans got rid of ‘zay’ and put the new letter G in its place. Of course, the letter ‘zay’ would reappear during the classical Roman period when the Romans started to borrow a lot of words from Greek, and they suddenly needed to represent the ‘z’ sound again. So at that point, they reintroduced the letter Z or ‘zed’ and put it at the end of the alphabet.

Also, note that the Romans tinkered with the letter F as well. Up to this point, the sixth letter of the alphabet represented the ‘w’ sound in Greek and Etruscan. The Romans moved this sound nearer to the back of the alphabet and that freed up the 6 letters. Now the Greeks and the Etruscans didn’t actually have an ‘f’ sound in their respective languages. The Greek had a ‘pf’ sound that was probably a sound that was in transition from the original ‘p’ sound to an ‘f’ sound. Greek had invented a new letter called ‘phi’ (they probably called it /fee/) to cover that in-between ‘pf’ sound. And that was as close as the Greeks came to an ‘f’ sound. But the Romans did have an ‘f’ sound in Latin. And that Greek sound ‘phi’ was by this point being pronounced simply as an ‘f’ sound just like we do today in words like phone and philosophy because that sound had completed its transition to the ‘f’ sound by this point. So the Romans had to find a way to write the ‘f’ sound since the alphabet they borrowed from the Etruscans did not have a letter for the ‘f’ sound. So they used that sixth letter which had previously represented the ‘w’ sound but was now free. So our modern letter F with the ‘f’ sound was born. And the Romans decided to use that letter for native Latin words. But for those Greek words which were being borrowed into Latin, they chose to use the ‘PH’ combination to represent the original Greek letter ‘phi.’ So that is why we still have that ‘PH’ spelling for the ‘f’ sound in Modern English. It represents words that were borrowed into Latin from Greek which had that original ‘phi’ letter to represent that in-between ‘pf’ sound.

A:

Originally represented the /a:/ sound in Latin (as in Father). 

However, modern English has more common that ‘short [a]’ sound (/æ/) has been around since Old English. (ex: hat, back, sad and apple). Old English had a specific letter for that sound: ash. That letter was created because the /æ/ sound was a little different from the /a:/ sound usually represented by letter A. But after the Norman Conquest, the French-trained scribes didn’t see a need for the letter ash, so it gradually disappeared. During the Middle English period, it was replaced with letter [a], and that spelling persists to this day.

And then like the change in the sound of all other Vowels, the Great Vowel Shift occurred. 

B: 

The sound represented by letter [b] hasn’t really changed, but we do have a few silent [b]’s in words like doubt and debt. They were added because the Latin roots of those words had a [b] in them because they were pronounced with a ‘b’ sound in Latin. 

C:

The hard /k/ sound is the original sound of letter [c] going back to Latin, and we still use the letter in that way when it appears before the vowels [a], [o] and [u].  And the letter usually has the soft /s/ sound when it appears before the vowel letters [e] and [i]. 

See :The Centum / Satem split

However, in words like ocean, social, facial and precious – the [c] appears before an [e] or [i], so that was the sound used in those words in the mid-1500s (/oh-see-an/ instead of /oh-shun/, and /soh-see-al/ instead of /soh-shul/). That’s why those words are spelled that way. But the modern /sh/ sound in those words started to appear by the late 1500s and early 1600s.

D:

[d] is a consonant letter, and it hasn’t changed much over time.

E:

The short sound of letter [e] is /e/ as in pet, bed, etc.. The letter [e] by itself before a consonant usually represents that sound, and that short sound has been pretty stable since English adopted the Latin alphabet in the early Middle Ages. 

Long e sound (Tree, Bee, etc) : Scribes and printers usually represented the ‘long [e]’ sound by doubling the [e]’s, but another technique used by French scribes was to place an [I] before the [e] or after the [e], thereby producing the [ei] and [ie] letter combination for the sound. That spelling was often retained in words that were taken from French, and was sometimes even applied to native English words (grieve, chief, brief, field, receive, ceiling, etc). Most of those words have essentially the same phonetic history as words like tree and be and feet. They experienced the same vowel shift. They just use a slightly different spelling to represent the same sound.

What about the ea words (please, heat, etc.)? 
The [ea] spelling was once used for a different sound, but again, the sound shifted and merged with the /i:/ sound in those other words. And since the spelling of these [ea] words was already locked in place, they have retained that spelling over time. 
(So a word like feast was once pronounced as /fe:st/ – a sound still heard in the related word festival. And a word like read (r-e-a-d) was once pronounced as /re:d/ – a sound still heard in the past tense form and the word leave was once pronounced as /le:v/ – a sound still heard in the past tense form - left.)

(we still find that old [ea] spelling in words like head, death, deaf, bread, sweat, spread, weather, measure, ready, and so on. These words retain an original /e/ pronunciation; they just use a slightly shorter version of it. A few of those words also got stuck in the middle with the /e:/ sound. And those words are great, steak, and break. But most of the words spelled with [ea] moved on to the /i:/ pronunciation we use today in words like clean, seat, speak, etc.)

F:

The sound it represents has been pretty stable in English since spellings became fixed. 

But, we also have the alternate [ph] spelling for the ‘f’ sound, and that spelling is almost always found in loanwords from Greek, who used the letter Phi for the sound.

G:

Hard g (as in game, go, etc.): The traditional sound. When the alphabet was brought to England from Rome, the Anglo-Saxons applied letter [g] to the same sound in Old English.

Soft g (as in germ, gender, etc.): As French evolved out of Latin in western Europe, the sound started to change in some words. When a [g] appeared before letters [e] or [i], the sound changed and produced the so called ‘soft’ sound of letter. That’s the /j/ sound. That happened because the sounds represented by [e] and [i] are pronounced with the front of the tongue raised, and the ‘g’ sound was sort of pulled forward to the palate region, thereby creating that /j/ sound.

Note: The soft /j/ sound didn’t exist in Latin, so Latin didn’t have a letter for it. Most words that use the ‘soft [g]’ today are French loanwords.

Interestingly, even in French, there were a few words that retained a ‘hard [g]’ sound before [e] or [i], and in those cases, the French scribes had to figure out a way to make it clear the [g] retained its original sound. So they came up with a new spelling. That added a [u] after the [g] as an alternate way of indicating a ‘hard [g]’ sound. (Ex: guest, guide, guild, guitar, guilty, disguise and even before the other vowel letters like guard and guarantee.)

In Dutch, scribes had a different way of indicating the ‘hard [g]’ sound. They would add an [h] after the [g], (Ex: ghost, ghastly, aghast.Remeber that the Dutch began using the printing press before the English did. In fact, the first English printing press was brought over from the Netherlands, and some of the Dutch assistants and typesetters came with it. And that allowed some of those Dutch spelling conventions to pass into English. Italians did the same - Ghetto, Spaghetti)

Then why is /gh/ silent in words like night, eight, etc?

The silent [gh] is native to English. This particular [gh] spelling emerged in Middle English to spell the /x/ sound, which was still common in English at the time. So the word night was originally pronounced more like /nixt/. 

That still doesn't explain the /f/ sound of gh in words like laugh, cough, etc.

This is the same [gh] that was used to represent the /x/ sound in Middle English. But where that sound occurred at the end of a word, it sometimes became an /f/ sound. A word like laugh would have been pronounced /laux/. This word – and most of the other words where the ‘f’ sound emerged at the end – had a vowel sound that was pronounced with rounded lips and hence closer to /f/ sound which eventually became the dominant sound.

What about Gnaw , Gnat, etc?

Those are Old English words. Old English had the initial /gn/ sound in some words, just like it had the initial /kn/ sound preserved in so many words.

H:

Old Englih had the pronoounced /h/ sound but French words had silent H at the beginning. This also explains the confusion and differing pronounciation of words like, Honor, Honest, Herb,Hello,  and even House.

I:

Same as other vowels. Original short sound and then hte long sound due to the Vowel Shifts.

J:

It is basically I with a little flourish or a little tail at the bottom.  Letter [j] as a distinct letter for the /dj/ sound didn’t exist until 1619.

The /dj/ sound was also rare in Old English, but it did sometimes appear at the end of a word like the words edge and bridge. Since there was no Latin letter for the sound, Old English scribes had to invent a way to represent the sound. They usually used some form of letter G – sometimes a double [g], sometimes a [cg] letter combination, and sometimes they came up with other variations. That uncertainty evolved into a [dg] spelling in Middle English, which was the precursor of our modern [dge] spelling in words like edge, bridge, ledge and so on.

The hard /g/ sound was softened in French and became a /dj/ sound in certain words. So in those words, the letter [g] was used to represent that /dj/ sound, and that spelling passed into English in words like gentle, giant, etc.

Note: when used with other vowels, the /i/ sound tends to become a /y/ sound (ex the second i in Olivia).  And that’s what happened in a lot of words in Late Latin and early French. But then the sound continued to evolve in some words. In fact, the sound evolved into different sounds throughout western Europe, but in French, it gradually became a /dj/ sound in many words.

Ex: Julius. It is often written with an [I] in Latin as ‘I-u-l-i-u-s.’. (This /y/ vs /j/ intechange is also seen in Hindi variations ex. 

जुग सहस्त्र जोजन पर भानु

vs

युग सहस्त्र योजन पर भानु

K:

[k] was rarely used in English before the 1200s. During the Old English period, scribes generally used the letter [c] for the /k/ sound. [k] was adopted during the Middle English period, because [c] had by then also adopted the /s/ sound and was causing confusion. 

The use of letter [k] in Modern English is still pretty straight-forward, but the primary exception is the silent [k] at the beginning of many words like knife, knee, etc. Of course, those [k]’s are there because there was once a ‘k’ sound at the front of those words. So a word like knife was /k-neef/, and knee was /k-nay/. Remember that English spelling largely reflects the way words were pronounced in the mid-1500s.

L:

When an [L] occurs in the middle of syllable, specifically when it is wedged between a vowel on one side and a consonant on the other side, then the ‘L‘ sound has had a tendency to disappear (chalk, talk, etc). That generally happened after the mid-1500s – after the spellings had started to become fixed. So those words shave a silent [L] today which reflects an older ‘L’ sound that has been lost.

Vice versa, a few words that didn’t originally have an [L], got one during the 1500s based on the etymology of the word. These are words that ultimately come from Latin where there was an ‘L’ sound in the distant past, but the sound was lost as the words passed through French. So when English speakers borrowed the words from French, they didn’t have the ‘L’ sound anymore. But in the 1500s, scholars started to add an [L] to the spelling to reflect that sound that had been lost. That’s what happened with salmon, which is still usually pronounced without an ‘L’ sound. The same thing happened with words like fault, vault and assault. Those words were borrowed from French as faute, vaute and asaut, but when scholars added the [L] back in to reflect the ancient history of those words, it affected the way people pronounced them.

M and N: pretty stable

O:

short  /o/ sound is sometimes called a ‘rounded’ vowel sound because the lips are rounded when it is pronounced.

However, in American English the lips are not rounded and that’s really the main difference between the ‘short [o]’ sound in British English and American English. In Britain, the lips are still rounded a bit, while in North America, they’re not. And that’s why words like spa and pot use the same vowel sound in American English, but tend to have slightly different sounds in British English.

[Is this straightening of the /o/ sound also often related to class, and is even evident in Hindi. (ex. कोई काम करो  - focus on the o sound - kOi kaam karO - might become - कउनो काम करा - kAuno kaam karAA)?? And how about Bengali A vs O?]

Long /o/ sound adopted both the magic 'e' at the end or the 'oa' spelling (hope, boat, etc.)

Q: What's the deal with 'oo'? Why is it sometimes short /u/ or long /uu/ sound? (foot, book, vs pool, room, etc.) instead of giving long /o/ like 'ee' does for long /e/?

A: Because of the Great Vowel Shift. Plus; because in Middle English the letter [o] was used to represent two different long vowel sounds, and the scribes didn’t have enough letters for all the vowel sounds in English. So English scribes had to figure out a way to make the letter [o] represent both of those sounds. For the /o:/ sound, which is made with back of the tongue slightly raised, the scribes tended to double the O. That’s a long vowel sound and it was common to represent long vowels sounds by doubling the vowel letter. And that is the sound that shifted during the Great Vowel Shift to the /u:/ sound, which is basically a ‘long [u]’ sound. And that’s why so many of those double-[o] words have that /u:/ sound today like room, boot, mood, choose, and so on. And in some of those words, the vowel later shortened and changed again, thereby producing the pronunciation in words like foot, took, book, good and so on. 

P: 

Consistently applied to the same sound since the Old English period.

A few words with a silent [p], like the word receipt. And that’s because the original Latin root word passed through French where it lost its ‘p’ sound. English scholars then added the [p] back into the word in the 1500s to reflect the original Latin pronunciation of the word. The ‘p’ sound can still be found in other versions of the same root word, like reception and receptacle.

(Also see, the extra notes section)

Q:

The letter [q] wasn’t really used in Old English. But after 'c' acquired /s/ sound, both [k] and [q] became more popular in English after the Norman Conquest. And even native words like queen and quick had their original [c]’s replaced with [q]’s under that French influence.

R:

The letter [r] was generally trilled or rolled in Old English and Middle English. So instead of saying rat, people were more likely to say /rrrat/. 

Today, many English accents drop the ‘r’ sound in certain words, especially where it appears after a vowel sound in the middle or at the end of a syllable (ex: birth, fear, etc.). The tendency to pronounce the ‘r’ sound in those situations is called ‘rhoticity.’ So Standard American English as said to be ‘rhotic,’ whereas the Standard English of southern England tends to be non-rhotic. 

[The letter 'r' has the most complex and varied sound history and covering all those here will make the notes too long and boring. Suggest other sources if interested in all other variations]

S:

Before 'z' was added to the english alphabet, 's' was used for /s/ and the /z/ sounds. (the ‘s’ and ‘z’ sounds are basically the same sound. The only difference is that the vocal chords are activated when we pronounced the ‘z’ sound, so it creates a buzzing sound (/z/))

Compare 'his' vs 'this'

Normally, the pronunciation of the plural ‘s’ sound at the end of a noun varies depending on the sound that comes before it. So we say tacks with an ‘s’ sound at the end, and tags with a ‘z’ sound at the end.

It also can represent the ‘sh’ sound. This sound change occurred when the ‘s’ sound was followed by [I] and another vowel – so usually [-ion] or [-ient] and something similar.

T:

Pretty straightforward because it almost always represents the /t/ sound and has done so since Old English. 

There are a few French loanwords where the [t] is silent at the end, like ballet, buffet,etc. Sometimes a [t] is silent in the middle of word, like in castle, whistle, wrestle, listen, and so on. Those are usually [t]’s that became silent at some point after the spelling became fixed. 

Just like with [s], when [t] was followed by [i] and another vowel, it produced the ‘sh’ sound (/sh/). This usually happened in words ending in [t-i-o-n].

A similar change occurred when the letter [t] was followed by [-ure], but in those cases, the [t] became a ‘ch’ sound (/ch/).

U:

 The original vowel sound heard in the word put, and the newer sound heard in the word putt.  Interestingly, this newer ‘short [u]’ sound didn’t emerged in northern England, so even today, most speakers in northern England tend to use the older vowel. It’s a quick way to detect an accent from northern England. 

Sometimes two words were pronounced and spelled the same way, but meant something completely different, so scribes distinguished them by giving one of them a different spelling. That’s what happened with sun and son. They were both originally spelled with a [u], but scribes decided to distinguish them by giving the word for a male child an [o] in place of the original [u]. The same thing happened with words like some and sum.

And there is also another reason why we use [o]’s to spell words with these ‘short [u]’ sounds. And this  reason was also part of a conscious decision to avoid confusion – though it produced its own confusion in the long term. In many words, the original [u]’s were replaced with [o]’s because letter [u] tended to get lost in the Gothic script that was used in early Modern English.  Many curvy letters were actually written with straight lines. So a [u] was written with two bold straight lines, which were connected with a little flourish at the bottom. An [n] was the opposite. It was written with two bold straight lines connected with a little flourish at the top. And [m] had three straight lines connected with flourishes at the top. And [i] was just a straight line with a flourish at the bottom. In writing, all of those straight lines blended together. A word like minimum looked like fifteen straight lines connected by various flourishes at the top or bottom. 

Scribes looked for a way to make the vowel sound stand out in the line of letters, and one solution was to simply replace the [u] with an [o], which had a rounder shape and stood out better. And through that process, a lot of words that originally had a letter [u] now got a brand-new letter [o]. That included words like love, come, some, monk, tongue, honey, above, and wonder. (This idea was also borrowed from French, who used "ou" for the /oo/ sound - ex. vous, nous, etc)

The ‘long [u]’ sound was /oo/. And it was found in the original version of words like house, and mouse, and south, etc. They were originally pronounced /hus/, /mus/, /suth/. It was affected by the Great Vowel Shift. Some regional dialects of English still retain one of those older pronunciations, but the English of southern England and the English of North America experienced both changes. 

Also V, and W:

'u' represented the ‘w’ sound as well, a spelling that we still find in words with [qu] like quick, queen, etc. It then became common practice to double the letter [u] when it represented the /w/ sound, printers created a specific letter for that purpose which consisted of two [u]’s put together, and that gave us a new letter which became known as [w] (‘double-U’).

But even after that development, the letter [u] was still being used to represent all of the vowel sounds of the letter and the consonant sound /v/. Both versions were used for all of those sounds. So the letter had two distinct shapes and could be used for a set of vowel sounds and a separate consonant sound. It was only a matter a time before printers decided to dedicate one shape to the vowel sounds and the other shape to the consonant sound. 

X:

 It’s a letter that goes back to the Greeks, and it represents the same sound that we normally spelled with [ks] (Tax vs tacks)

The Greeks also had that ‘ks’ sound at the beginning of words, but English doesn’t. So when an [x] appears at the front of a word, we usually just pronounce it as ‘z’ sound instead. Or a mix, as in 'exit'.

Y:

The consonant/semi-vowel sound hasn't changed much, esp in words starting with 'y'.

The letter once represented a distinct vowel sound that no longer exists in the language. That was the /ü/ sound. But during the Middle English period, that sound merged with the /i:/ sound, which was represented with letter [i]. And from that point on, [y] basically became an alternate way of spelling the vowel sounds represented by letter [i]

Z:

[z] was really introduced to English during the Middle English period. It obviously represents the /z/ sound, and  the same sound is also sometimes represented by letter [s] which was the more traditional letter used for that sound in earlier forms of English. Other than that, the use of the letter [z] is pretty straight-forward in English.