In the Roman alphabet there were only 24, not 26, letters. The (graphical) letter V existed in the alphabet, but it represented what we now use U to represent. The “double U” is “W” and not “U” because the “V” symbol, at that time, represented “U” as we know it.With The Story of English in 100 Words, David Crystal took us on a tour through the history of our language. Now, with Spell It Out, he takes on the task of answering all the questions about how we spell: "Why is English spelling so difficult?" Or "Why are good spellers so proud of their achievement that when they see a misspelling they condemn the writer as sloppy, lazy, or uneducated?" In thirty-seven short, engaging and informative chapters, Crystal takes readers on a history of English spelling, starting with the Roman missionaries' sixth century introduction of the Roman alphabet and ending with where the language might be going. He looks individually at each letter in the alphabet and its origins. He considers the question of vowels and how people developed a way to tell whether or not it was long or short. He looks at influences from other cultures, and explains how English speakers understood that the "o" in "hopping" was a short vowel, rather than the long vowel of "hoping". If you've ever asked yourself questions like "Why do the words "their", "there" and "they're" sound alike, but mean very different things?" or "How can we tell the difference between "charge" the verb and "charge" the noun?" David Crystal's Spell It Out will spell it all out for you.Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling, and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling Dec 2, 2014 by David Crystal
Well, most likely in normal practice, there were 20 letters in the Latin alphabet. C was used full-time for the K sound, and G became a full-time letter when C was no longer used for the “voiced” version of the sound. K and Y were used in Greek loanwords. J did not exist, since I represented two sounds (they are “long E” and consonant “Y” in English) and J came about later to represent the distinction among students and scholars.