X, Y, Z, And…
And what? Well, that was the question. Did you know that until 200 years ago the English alphabet had 27 letters? Ok, if you did not know it, you have you probably guessed it by now. Yes, the ampersand (‘&’) was the 27th letter of the alphabet. Only it did not have a name. It was simply called ‘and’.
The symbol for the ampersand, a corruption of the Latin word ‘et’, meaning ‘and’, had no specific name for almost 2000 years. Scholars reciting the alphabet ended it with ‘X, Y, Z, And’ but it sounded blunt as if something else was to follow. To remedy the problem they had to end it with ‘X, Y, Z, and per se (meaning: on its own), And’, effectively saying ‘X, Y, Z, and on its own, And’.
With time the phrase ‘and per se And’ got slurred together and the ampersand got its name just in time before being removed from the English alphabet.
When a word comes about from a mistaken pronunciation, it’s called a mondegreen. I wonder how many other English words came about this way.
Make the most of today. It is the first day of the rest of your life.
Comments (14)
We do learn new things here from time to time, don't we all?!?
Well, gotta run now! Got a reunion party to attend to!
Catch up with you later, Catfoot!
Enjoy it and be careful. Reunions are know to light old flames.
We also have a few extra characters like è, é, ê, ë, and ô, but we don't recite them in our alphabet.
Yes, I can think of a few classics.
when I was a kid I used to believe the babel's bible story
about how the languages were created, now for me is a good
fairy tale to tell/and kind of nonsense as true story
Quite so, but let's not dwell on that today.
No, I did not miss it, I just did not discuss it. I only spoke about the ampersand (trying to keep my blogs shorter
It's funny, when you live in an English world, one easily forget that different languages can have different alphabets. the German 'ß' comes to mind.
As DC stated you learn something new everyday day. Thanks for today's lesson!
Hope all is well!
Great to see you around. Your blog was long overdue. It's sorry that it is sort of bad news.