5 Insane Things You Don't Know About Letters of the Alphabet

J got its start hanging around in I's posse, and the first J's were basically I's that some monk got a little crazy drawing.

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"Let's iazz this shit up a bit."

These long I, J-looking things would have still been pronounced as "I" for a while, but at some point in the Middle Ages, they took on that "J" sound we all know and love. Once that process began, all sorts of I words were given new, trendy J's for no real reason. The most notable of these hip new J-wearers was a guy called Jesus, previous known as Iesus (and Yeshua way before that).

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"Nice work translating my name, guys. Good work all around."

So that's kind of fun, right? A little tidbit to share in the next circle ierk you end up in?

The U was supposedly the vowel version of the letter and the V the consonant version, but they were still written the same, and also probably pronounced like "W," so who knows what the fuck was really going on. W, U, and V all basically came from the same letter (so did Y, actually).

This little corner of the alphabet is so inbred that we're lucky we don't have a doubledouble-U around, drooling over everything.

Well it turns out that they did actually write "The," even if they didn't really know it. Because back in ye old times, that "Ye" wasn't spelled with a "Y" but a completely separate letter called a "thorn." Here's what a thorn looks like when it's wearing a little "e" as a hat:

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Look familiar? That P or Y-looking thing is the thorn, and is pronounced "th." With the adorable little hat, it is pronounced exactly the same as "the," and the modern interpretation, Ye, should probably be pronounced the same way. It's actually a pretty useful letter, considering how widely used "the" is in the English language. There's even at least one fella suggesting we build an entirely new letter just to accommodate it.

Needs a hat if you ask me.

But those all involved new spellings with the usual array of letters. At least a few people have proposed changing the actual alphabet itself. These proposals generally aim to get rid of letters that have sounds covered by other letters (i.e. dumping C, whose roles can be covered by K or S) or to add letters to accommodate common sounds that require the use of more than one letter (like SH, or NG). For example, back in tricorn hat days, Benjamin Franklin proposed a version of the alphabet which would have resulted in writing like this:

Wikimedia Commons
Translation: "Dear Penthouse, I never thought this would have happened to me."

The idea didn't really catch on because no one actually knew that Franklin was proposing it. "Seems our dear friend Benjamin Franklin is having a stroke," was I believe the most common interpretation.

These kind of merged letters are called ligatures, and there are still a few loitering in the shadows of the English alphabet. But none are as old or as popular as the ampersand, which, because it was widely used in actual Latin texts, got copied down into Latin alphabets by various scholars in the Middle Ages. And as our alphabet derives from their work, the ampersand loitered on the edge of the English alphabet well into the 1800's. It's mentioned specifically in a well-known predecessor of the Alphabet song.

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"Oh my god, Becky. Look at its butt."

The crazy name comes to us in a similar way. Because the ampersand was found at the end of the alphabet, people saying their ABC's would end their recitation with "and, per se and." Which, when sort of translated, means "&, itself meaning 'and.'" Which is clever, although kind of hard to remember. There are easier mnemonic devices for remembering the ampersand.

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For example: if you see anything other than a dog dragging its ass on the ground, well, now you never will again.

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and your best friend. His first novel, Severance, is incredible and available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Apex Books. Join him on Facebook or Twitter.

For more from Bucholz, check out 4 Reasons People Hate It When You Compliment Them and The 5 Weirdest Ways Words Have Changed Meanings.

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