Posted on 07/09/2013 6:43:45 AM PDT by Red Badger
WOULDN'T it be easier if the word "the" was just simply a letter?
Well at least one person seems to think so.
Aussie restaurateur, Paul Mathis has invented a new letter of the alphabet to replace the word "the" because he thinks it is more efficient.
The letter looks like the Cyrillic letter 'Ћ'. If an upper case T and a lower case h were to have a typographic baby, this is what it would look like.
Mathis has invested $38,000 into developing the symbol which he would like to see added as a 27th letter of the alphabet.
"The word 'and' is only the fifth-most used word in English and it has its own symbol - the ampersand," Mathis told The Age. "Isn't it time we accorded the same respect to 'the'?"
And if you think that's crazy talk, it wouldn't actually be the first time the English alphabet had more than 26 letters.
The ampisand, short for "and" used to be an actual letter which came after the letter Z in the alphabet.
The symbol is a combination of the letters "et", which is Latin for "and".
People would distinguish the letter from the word and by putting the words "per se" in front of it.
For example, if you were reciting the alphabet you would end with "w, x, y, z and per se and".
Redundant? Yes. Confusing? Definitely. Which is why the term "ampersand" was often used to replace it.
Mathis says his new symbol will help "in the texting space" such as Twitter or texts.
But first he'll have to convince mobile phone developers and keyboard manufacturers to add a new key to their devices.
In the meantime you can download the app and get a keyboard with the new letter.
It’s The Prologue to Canterbury Tales, written in English................OLDE ENGLISH.............
So I say we have enough letters as it is, government schools have enough trouble teaching just those.
With Hip-Hop and Gangsta words infiltrating the vernacular, I can’t understand a lot of what is spoken today.........8^(
I agree. And it’s not really the hip-hop culture that bothers me half as much as the main-stream media’s adoption of the whole thing like it’s a good addition to our society.
ROR!........RAFF OUT ROUD!..........
During WWII, the Brits and the Americans had a difficult time communicating even simple things, prompting Churchill to remark, “Two great nations separated by a common language.....”
Figured it was something along those lines. Undoubtedly old Germanic (Angle and Saxon) in origin, when spoken with a sort of Scots burr it was quite a lovely sounding language.
Exactly.
The Emperor Claudius invented three new letters of the alphabet. The Romans used them until Claudius died.
Ћ End............
Geez. Isn’t 47 letters in the alphabet enough?
Well for now, "Big Barack" is still symbolized as follows:
(_*_)
My hubby who’s initials are TH has been drawing it that way since childhood.
So what? Holly decimalised music by adding two notes. Top that!
As you will note, the selection from Chaucer does NOT contain case endings (except for those that have survived into Modern English). After the Norman Invasion in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon language was subborned to the native French of William the Conqueror and his cohorts. For this reason, The old Germanic Anglo-Saxon language was supplanted by Middle English (a combination of some A-S words, some Latin words, and many French words). Rather than a Scottish burr, it should be spoke with a French elision and vowels that do not change in pronunciation (we're before the great vowel shift that gave us multiple sounds for each vowel). "A" is ah, like in bawl; e is eh, like in wet; i is ee, like in beat; and so on.
The proper pronunciation of the first line from Chaucer would have been like : Wh-ah-n th-ah-t Ah-preel weeth hees shoh-wehrs sh-oh-t, etc (with vowels separated in my transliteration, but not in actual speech).
So, in reality, the thorn character was used in Anglo-Saxon (Old English), but was gone from Chaucer's dialect of Middle English by the time he wrote (but it still existed in some northern dialects of Middle English... like that of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight... but that's a whole other discussion)...
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