History of the Alphabets (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.