Roommates 2.0 #2
2024/07/20
Hi there, Bear!
I don't much see a point in dancing around the issue anymore. Here in my second installment of Roommates 2.0, where the foundation has already been laid and I have no need to explain myself to any onlookers, we can get right into the meat and potatoes. Of course, the first step of doing this is to just front-load my letter with word cruft. Think of it like hand stretches or something.
But, yes — this is Roommates 2.0, this is my second letter, and in picking up from where I left off, I will present to you A COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE NEXT TEN LETTERS IN THE MODERN ISO BASIC LATIN ALPHABET. We initiate our journey from the humble ninth letter, "I," and terminate at the terrifying twentieth letter, "T." I'm not even going to bother to ask if you found my previous letter engaging or interesting because, to be honest, I just really wanna write about this stuff. It's fascinating! I've learned so much!
Anyway. Let's get down to business. (Complete the rest of the song in your head if you want, but please don't sing it out loud; it'll distract me.)
I
Now, I (I could comment on every single use of the word "I" in this section but I'm going to show huge restraint and only do it the first time, i.e. right now; you're welcome) know what you're thinking. "I" is the simplest thing ever! What possible evolution could it have? Well, it's true that "I" was a straight line as far back as the Greek alphabet's "iota" (I), but before that, there was the Phoenician "yodh" (𐤉), a backwards "F" with a tail. What's its deal?
Well, the best guess is that it came from a hieroglyph for an outstretched arm. It bends at a ninety degree angle to the left, with an upturned hand that looks like it wants something from you. Or something, I dunno. In Egyptian, this symbol represented the voiced pharyngeal fricative, a consonantal sound not used in English that I can only describe as a weird /r/-type sound. It was then reassigned to the voiced palatal approximant (/j/) in the Semitic languages, which you'd know as the "y" in "you," because that's the sound the Semitic word for "arm" started with.
You can see it, can't you? The top of "yodh" almost looks like a claw hand grabbing for something, and the tail is the vestigial remnant of the upper arm! Of course, all the extra bits got lopped off once the Greeks simplified the symbols down, leaving us with the good, old, elegant "I." But... that's not really the end of the story for "I." Like, how does a symbol that makes the "yuh" sound become the "ih" sound (whose full name is, fun fact, the near-close near-front unrounded vowel)? Well, to fully answer that, we need to bring in another letter.
(Fun fact: The dot above the lowercase "i" is called a "tittle." I have no idea what its etymological origin is, but apparently, it is notably used in the King James Bible. Matthew 5:18 reads, "For verily I say unto you, 'Til heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Law, 'till all be fulfilled.'" These were translated from the Greek "iota" (hint hint) and "keraia" (a very small character that's essentially a diacritic). Anyway...)
J
This probably isn't that surprising if you pay attention to the inscriptions on old Manhattan buildings, but "I" and "J" didn't become separate entities until the sixteenth century — and you thought "G" showing up during the Roman Empire made it a late arrival! Apparently, this is another letter we can trace to a specific person: Gian Giorgio Trissino was the first to do so around 1524, in his "Epistle About the Letters Recently Added to the Italian Language." However, "J" already had a bit of a storied history in relation to the letter "I" that made this jump not as crazy as you might think.
Back in the day, the glyph "J" was commonly used as a swash variant of "I". Swashes are typographical flourishes of some sort, like an exaggerated serif, tail, entry stroke, or anything like that. Essentially, it just means people felt like extending the bottom of an "I" whenever it had a notable position in a word. One big example was if "I" started a word — and, since the initial "I" had a consonantal power (remember, back then it was more aligned to the "yuh" (/j/) sound), that swashed "I" (*cough* "J" *cough*) was already somewhat primed to be seen as a consonant! (Another example: the final "I" in a Roman numeral was sometimes depicted as swashed, so thirteen could be "XIII" or "XIIJ.")
Anyway, back to Trissino. His distinction between these symbols is what truly codified "I" as being a vowel and "J" as being a consonant, and it's from him that the soft "J" sound (as in "jam") became truly linked with the symbol, pivoting away from the "yuh" that iota had been. This is how we got from "Yeshua" in Hebrew, from "Iesus" in Greek, to "Jesus" in English. "Yuh" has, finally, become "Juh." Remnants of ye olde origin of "J" still persist in our language today though — just take "hallelujah," pronounced with a "yuh," as an example! (And take "fjord" as another.)
I could go on and on for a while about the different sounds "J" takes in different languages but even I worry about being boring sometimes. I guess I'll close by saying that after "J" split off from "I" as a consonant, the actual "I" went through a series of shifts as English developed, going from /j/ to /i:/ (the "i" in "machine") and /ɪ/ (the "i" in "bill), and then to /aɪ/ (the "i" in "kite"). Oh, and the capitalized "I" as the first-person pronoun was invented so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before printing began, circa 1250. (Allegedly, this is why tittles first came about too.)
K
At this point, this is a tale as old as time. "K" started as an Egyptian hieroglyph that was then given a different sound value in the Semitic languages because the word that hieroglyph represented started with that different sound. Then it matured in Phoenician, and then the Greeks codified it, and then with just a little alteration by the Etruscans, it became permanent in Latin. Wow! Who could have seen that one coming?
I do like the path "K" took, though. Its hieroglyph, representing the sound "/d/", was a hand! So handy was this hand that it used not only for /d/, but also to mean "hand," or to imply the use of hands in an action. ("Hand" was spelled "d-r-t," or "djeret," in Egyptian.) This became "kaph" (or "kay") in Semitic, which is both the Semitic abjads' eleventh letter, but also literally means "palm" in Arabic and Hebrew to this day. The Phoenician "kaph" (𐤊) already closely resembles our "K," just reversed, a switch that the Greeks would make with the "kappa" (K).
Funnily enough, I can kinda see how a hand became a "𐤊" by looking at the in-betweens from Egyptian to Phoenician. The Proto-Sinaitic "K" is this "U" with two lines in the middle, like a super abstracted palm, and the Proto-Canaanite "kay" looks like a reversed "∈," which is the classic kind of stick figure hand you'd see in, like, Diary of Wimpy Kid. No wonder "K" got derived from that — doesn't K" itself look like four cartoony outstretched stick figure fingers in its own way?
Anyway, "K" actually really isn't used all that often — it's the fifth-rarest letter in English. But that wasn't always the case... Come Latin, it had the name "ka" (pronounced "ka") to differentiate it from C ("ce" [pronounced "ke"]) and Q ("qu" [pronounced "ku"]). Remember, in Early Latin, all three of those glyphs represented the sounds /k/ and /g/, which weren't differentiated in writing (which is why it was a big deal when "G" came about). "K" was used before the /a/ sound, like in "kalendis," and once "C" and "G" replaced most uses of "K" and "Q," "K" became quite rare. Even the Greek words taken into Latin were transliterated with a "C," as were loanwords from other alphabets. Because of this, the Romance languages generally use "C" for /k/ sounds, only using "K" for loanwords from other language groups. And after all that, even when English does use "k," some of the most iconic "k"-words have a silent "k." "Knife," "knight," "know," "knot," "knee..." You might notice another letter there. We'll get to it.
L
Oh, "L." How did we start taking you? Well, the most plausible explanation is a hieroglyph that looks like a cane. Some call it a cattle prod, others call it a shepherd staff, but no matter what way you look at it, it's an upside-down "J," which is, like, two steps removed from already being "L." This character became "lamedh" in the Semitic abjads, and *very* curiously, all of them basically agreed on its shape this time around. You've got the Hebrew "lamed" (ל), the Aramaic "lamad" (𐡋), the Syriac "lamad" (ܠ), the Arabic "lam" (ل), and the Phoenician "lamd" (𐤋). Sure, some of those are backwards, and the Hebrew has that weird double curve, but everyone seems to be on the same page! We don't even need to finagle the sound — even back then, they all knew it was /l/.
...And that's what makes the Greek "lambda" so baffling. How do you take this clear "L" thing and make it become "Λ"?! Like, okay, I guess I can see it. "L", "<," ">," "V," "Λ," these are all similar ways to represent the same fundamental glyph — two lines that meet at forty-five degrees or whatever. Rotate it whichever way you want, it's still kinda the same thing. So, like, yeah. But the extra flourishes they gave to the lowercase lambda (λ)? Like, you just invented a whole new letter at that point!! That's upside-down "y"! What's going on?!
Well, I found this nifty chart that shows a lot of alternate forms for Greek letters back in the early Greek alphabets — all the variants you might find when there wasn't a totally iron-clad consensus on how to write stuff. From browsing that, you can find pretty much any possible variant of what a "lambda" might look like — a lot of the orientations I listed above, and then some. I guess they all tried out a bunch of derivations of "lamedh," and then just decided to put the angle at the top. ...Until the Etruscan and Latin alphabets undid all that progress and put the angle back at the lower-left (L).
So, I guess at the end of the day, it really was the Roman Empire that took the "L". They took it and ran with it, all the way into hell. Ooh, two "L"s! Sweet.
M
Okay, so "M" has a bit of a zigzaggy history, owing to its literal shape as a series of zigzags. Its earliest probable ancestor is the Egyptian hieroglyph for water, which looks like a stubby zigzag, or, like, a row of video game spikes, or something. Shouldn't be too surprising if you think of the zodiac symbol Aquarius, which also uses zigzags for water. (Or, like, most other symbolic depictions of water.) That represented the /n/ sound, which was, of course, changed to /m/ in Semitic to correspond to the Proto-Semitic word for water, "*ma(y)-." (That's how Wikipedia spells it, so that's what I'm going with. If I interrogate every single symbol I'd be here for a fortnite, so I'm just not gonna question it.)
This then became the Phoenician letter "mem" (𐤌), and it is now my solemn duty to inform you that although "mem" is spelled "mim" in Syriac and Arabic, it is also, apparently, alternatively spelled "meem" and "meme." So, you know, there's that. From this, we can draw a direct cultural link between memes and water, suggesting that humans need memes in order to live. Fitting, given today's society.
Anyway, you can kinda see how "𐤌" looks like a bastardization of a zigzag. I don't know where they got that long final line from, but I dig it. Once "mem" became "mu" for the Greeks, they simplified it further, ditching that last line to make "M" as we know it. Funnily enough, the lowercase "mu" kept this aspect, becoming one of my all-time favorite glyphs, "μ." I wish we had a place for it in the modern alphabet. Look at it! A "u" with a line in the front. How bold. How brazen! It's art.
In what should come as a formality at this point, "mu" kept that crazy tail in the Western Greek script, which carried over into Etruscan and its forms (𐌌). The shape of this tail kept getting smaller and smaller until, finally, the Latin alphabet tapered it down into what we know and love today: "M." Also, this literally doesn't matter, but I just want you to know that some weird-ass "M" variants exist. You've got "Ɱ" (literally "M with hook"), "Ɯ" (used in Standard Zhuang, a branch of the Tai languages; representing the /ɯ/ sound (I don't even know how to explain what this is)), 𐌼 (the Gothic letter "manna"), and Ⲙ (the Coptic letter "me," which is different from the Gothic letter "manna" somehow).
N
You might think "N" has the same kind of history as "M," and on some level, you might be right. But, you also might not be?? It just depends on which theory you like more. So, we have the water ripple hieroglyph from earlier, which we already know makes the /n/ sound. That's one possible starting point. There's also our main culprit, the snake ("cobra in repose"), a hieroglyph of a snake chilling horizontally and then its tail head perks up in the top left and the tail drops down in the bottom right.
Some claim the Egyptian word for snake began with an "N" (such as "nahash"), and so the snake was used as a symbol for /n/, which would make this a rare example of the Egyptian hieroglyph perfectly matching with its eventual Semitic counterpart. However, according to Wikipedia "this theory has become disputed." More probable is that this snake was used for the English "J" (in this case, the Egyptian word was "djet"). Either way, according to this theory, the word for "snake" became "nahš" in Proto-Semitic, firmly linking the character to that sound. (This is also linked to the Ethiopian writing system, Ge'ez, where the character for "n" is "nähas" (ኑ, ኒ, ና, ኔ, ን, ኖ, ኗ).)
By the development of the Semitic abjads, "nahš" simplified in form and name to become "nun." The Phoenician "nūn" (𐤍) is obviously the most important for our purposes, but I do want to shout out the Syriac "nūn" too (ܢ), which is so long it escapes the parentheses meant to contain it. I guess they had their own ways of depicting snakes. Anyway, if you cross reference "𐤍" with my description of the shape of the snake hieroglyph, it's literally the exact same. Neat! The Greeks just then flipped that shape around with "nu," making it a bit more angled and a bit more crooked, and by the Etruscan alphabet, that got flattened a bit further to become "𐌍." Obviously that's just a hop and a skip away from "N," so, mission accomplished!
And as for why the lowercase "nu" looks like this — "v" — I'm not sure. I guess it's what happens when you lop the left end off of "N"? That's my best guess. Next!
O
Remember back with "I" when I showed that before the Greek "I," it was basically an entirely different thing? You might expect some similar chicanery to happen with "O," but, surprisingly, no! This fucker has been a circle for thousands of years — they really got it in one. The Phoenician "ayin" (𐤏) became the Greek "omicron" (O), which became the Etruscan "O," and then the Latin "O." There! D"o"ne. I mean done.
But come on. You know how this works. It's all well and good that "ayin" was a circle, but what was the hieroglyph that made it be a circle? So? Got any guesses? Think about circles you might find in nature. I'm sure a couple of obvious ones come to mind immediately — some big ones, so big they light up the sky both day and night. ...It's not those! Tricked you! But *then* what would it be? I wonder... I wonder. Eye... wonder.
Yep, "ayin" in Phoenician meant "eye," and so it was taken from a hieroglyph for "eye!" They included the actual shape of the eye and not just the pupil, but the Phoenicians decided to simplify things — and for once, one abstraction was all that was needed.
Perhaps more interesting is how "O" evolved in Greek. Originally, "ayin" represented the voiced pharyngeal fricative, a sound commonly mistaken as epiglottal that has no clear English equivalent. The Greeks turned it into a vowel, just like they'd done with other glyphs (like "A"). However, at first, "O" was only called "O," and it represented both the short o (/o/ ("yawn" in British English)) and the long o (/ɔ/ (as in "thought")). However, as the distinctions between long and short vowels started to disappear in pronunciation over time, two separate glyphs for these sounds were made. Thus, we got the small O, "omicron" (O), and the great O, "omega" (Ω).
P
I think it's funny that "P" is next to "O" on the alphabet, because they both have fairly analogous origins. Much like how "O" was secretly an eye all along, "P" is secretly... a mouth?! In the Semitic abjads, the glyph was "pē" (𐤐), which means "mouth." This, of course, leads to the belief that it came from the Egyptian hieroglyph for "mouth," which looks like... the body of a fish, I suppose. Definitely an abstracted representation of closed lips. Almost like a diamond, but with rounded sides. (Dunno how you get the hooked shape of "pē" from that, but go off.)
The Greeks codified "pē" into "pi" (Π), which took that hook and rebalanced it. Already a strong contender for my favorite Greek letter (its shape would stay unchanged in Cyrillic, though the name reverted to "pe" (П)), it's the lowercase variant — π — that escalates "pi" into true greatness. Look at it. The slight bow to the left leg. The upturned hook, replicating and inverting the Phoenician glyph, on the right leg. The downturn on the left end of the top line, itself mimicking the right leg. It's peak. It's cinema. It's perfect.
The Western Greek alphabet swapped the orientation of "𐤐" into "𐌐," which the Etruscans kept at first, though they progressively made the right end get curvier instead of blockier. From there, it was simple jump for the Romans to (eventually) close that curve into a loop, forming what we know as "P." I think the switch from "π" to "p" is such a massive downgrade that it's not even funny, but hey, what do I know. I'm not a grammarologist. You can quote me on that.
Perhaps my favorite part of this story is that for most of the Latin alphabet's history, you could have looked at "P" and likely never realized it was ultimately derived from a mouth. But now, in the post-modern era, we're primed more than ever to relate "P" to that shape, due to one simple thing: the emoticon for being a doofus (:P). Not really the closed lips of the Egyptian era, but hey. Mouth!
Q
Ah, "Q". Where would we be without you. Probably one of the weirdest letters in our alphabet, since it only ever shows up with its partner "U," and its shape is primed to make us see it as a weird copy. "It's just an 'O' with a tail," the Q-detractors might say. "What in the world led to that happening?" Well, if you've ever wondered that (let's say, hypothetically, for the sake of the argument, that you have; it would make my life much easier), you've come to the right place. Allow me to explain after I take a huge inward breath.
The earliest definitive starting point is the Phoenician glyph "qoph" (𐤒), which already looks a lot like a relative to our "Q." The other Semitic abjads emulate this shape to varying degrees, but they've all got the spirit: see the Hebrew "qūp" (ק), Aramaic "qop" (𐡒), Syriac qōp (ܩ), and Arabic qāf (ق). But where did this loop with a line running through it come from? Theory #1: the eye of a sewing needle. The Hebrew word for this is "quf" (קוף), and the Aramaic word is "qopaʔ" (קופא), so that checks out nicely. This would correspond to the Egyptian "wḏ," which, I mean, is a line with a circle in the middle. So yeah.
Theory #2: it might be the back of a head and neck, since "qāf" is "nape" in Arabic, allegedly? Could also be a cave, or a knot. Theory #3, which is an older suggestion that I feel like is probably not true but is my favorite, is that it's the body of a monkey with its tail drooping down. Proof? "Quf" is Hebrew not just for the eye of a needle, but also "monkey." Q.E.D., hieroglytheists.
Greek is where things really start to take off. While modern Greek no longer has a "Q" glyph, the earliest forms of Ancient Greek actually did — qoppa (Ϙ), which is both a graceful simplification of "qoph" (𐤒) and extremely close to our "Q"! At first, it probably represented various kinds of /k/ sounds as you'd expect, but due to later sound shifts in Greek, /k/ sounds became /p/ and /pʰ/ — the matter of which you might remember as the sound that "phi" (Φ) makes! Thus, "qoppa" evolved into "phi," returning to something that more closely approximated the shape of "𐤒," and the hieroglyph said to predate it, than "Ϙ" had been. ("Qoppa" does still persist in Greek today, as the Greek numeral for ninety.)
The Etruscans kept "qoppa" and its shape, and they were the ones who began combining it with "V" to represent the sound /kʷ/, the labialize voiceless velar plosive that we know as the classic "kwuh" sound. So, from "ϘV" to "QU." Nice! The Romans kept this in the Latin alphabet, and twisted the end of the glyph to the side, making "Q" as we know it. As you might remember from my dissertation on "K," "Q" was used most commonly before rounded vowels — for example, "EQO" ("ego") — but as time passed, "C" and "G" replaced most uses of "K" and "Q." As a result, "Q" is the second-rarest letter in English, and almost universally is followed by "U." A sad fate, to be sure... but it gets sadder.
Here's an unfun fact. Turkey banned the letter "Q" for nearly a century, from 1928 to 2013. "W" and "X" were also affected by this ban, known colloquially as the "alphabet law." The government's reasoning: they were changing Turkey's alphabet from Arabic to Roman in an effort to modernize, standardize, and convenientize the Turkish language. But, of course, it had the added bonus of enforcing cultural homogeneity and forcibly ignoring all minorities. For the 20% of Turkey's population that were Kurdish, and therefore used a language that commonly used "Q," "W," and "X," their names legally could not include those letters, and they couldn't even speak their language in public without punishment until the 1990s. Even after the ban was lifted in 2013, the letters were not added to the Turkish alphabet.
I could probably engage in another dissertation about the different kinds of uppercase "Q", whose tails can be short or long or anywhere in between, but I don't really feel like following that up. So, I'll let you decide how those evolved. Personally I think anything that isn't a short tail is stupid, anyway.
Oh, I will mention the two-shaped "Q," or as I like to call it, the "2-Q." Check it out.
R
This time, I'll open with the fun fact. Did you know that "R" is sometimes called the dog's letter, initially rendered in Latin as "littera canīna?" When you trill an "R", after all, you sound like a growling dog! It's so fun to me that the word for "dog" in Spanish, therefore, uses the "dog's voice" (vōx canīna; yes, this is a term). References to this phenomenon extend all the way up to Romeo & Juliet. And probably some other places too.
Anyway. What's the deal with the letter itself? Well, considering how "R" looks like "P" with an extra stroke, it might not surprise you much to learn that for most of its history, "R" looked a lot like "P." I'll spare you the guessing game and just say that our hieroglyphic culprit this time is, in all likelihood, an image of a head. Just imagine a head facing left with a little pointy beard and a shaved head, and you've got it. This morphed into a Proto-Sinaitic abstraction, and then into the Phoenician glyph "resh" (𐤓). I guess a triangle with a line is the simplest possible way to depict a head and a neck, huh? By adding that point you've even got the nose! (Or the beard, take your pick.) Better than a circle, I think.
From this, it was pretty trivial for the Greeks to flip "resh" around into "rho" (Ρ). I should probably let you know that it was still written in the angular fashion at times; I don't really know when the rounded variants were favored or vice versa. But anyway, this glyph still had a lot to leapn — I mean, learn. Apparently, some Western Greek alphabets started actually using a descending diagonal line to finish off their versions of "rho," creating what looks like "R" if you pressed the "B" button to cancel its evolution but you did it a millisecond too late it so it sort of half-evolved. Despite this radical development, it wasn't actually carried over into Old Italic, so even the Etruscans kept their "rho" as "P," and some even twisted it into a "D," negating the bottom stroke altogether! (Others still had yet another weird half-evolution that looked like "𐌓.")
Even the Romans couldn't get their shit together at first, and this is where problems really started. In the earliest versions of Latin, it became difficult to distinguish "P" and "R." Remember that "P" was undergoing its own evolution — at the time, it had looked like "𐌐," but that top line was gradually descending and curving. It hadn't fully closed yet, but it was close! Compare that to "P," and you might be able to see where the confusion started. Thankfully, by the 200s BC, everyone decided that something had to be done about this, and "R" gained its own diagonal stroke. How, exactly, I'm not sure. It wasn't just one person who thought of it, like "G" or "J". Maybe everyone realized the Western Greeks had it right all along? Or maybe cursive Latin, with its connecting lines, gave them the idea. Either way, "R" was now "R", and around fifty years after the birth of Jesus, "P" would have its loop closed, and truly become "P." The circle of sturidity was complete. I mean, stupidity. Fuck.
If you need more "R" in your life, and you do, check out this calligraphic variant of "R" called the "R rotunda" (Ꝛ). Sick, huh? It was used to denote an "r" following a letter with right-facing loops like "o", "b," h," and "p," ton better accommodate their shapes. And then it was used for a double "rr" too. Here, let me try it. "OꝚZ." "PEꝚꝚO."
Hm. You be the judge.
S
Ah, Chriʃt. This is a weird one.
The penultimate letter of the Phoenician abjad, "shin" (𐤔), probably reminds you a lot of some other letter. "W"ho knows "w"hich one? Its Proto-Sinaitic form was basically the same, and according to the people whose job it is to decipher such things, the hieroglyph it drew from was that of a tooth. I guess you can see a "W" as a pair of spiky fangs, yeah? Of course, since "tooth" was pronounced "šin (shin)" in the Semitic abjads, "𐤔" became associated with the "sh" (/ʃ/) sound.
Ancient Greek had no "sh" phoneme, though, so when the time came to rotate the "shin" around and make the "sigma" (Σ), it represented the /s/ sound that we all know and love. (Apparently this is the most common sound in the world, across all languages. Cool!) Fun fact in the middle of a paragraph because I'm so cool: though the shape of "Σ" is derived from "shin," its name is possibly taken from another Phoenician letter, "samekh" (𐤎). ("Samekh" would go on to directly inspire the Greek letter "xi" (Ξ), and "xi" may have taken its name from "shin," bringing this tangent full circle!)
Now, let's make things even more confusing. We've already talked about the Greek letter "mu" (M), but did you know about the Greek letter "san" (M)? Yep, that's right! There are two Ms! Deal with it! Adapted from the Phoenician letter "tsade" (𐤑), "san" was only used in some Western Greek alphabets, and it was always used in opposition to "sigma." In this house, you're either a "Σ" male or a "M" beta. Or something. By the 700s "san" was pretty much phased out — although according to some, "san" was the initial name for "sigma," so in some way, "san" is still very much alive! And according to another theory, the name "sigma" wasn't even a rip of "samekh" at all, but a twist from the Greek word for "hissing" (σίζω)! Definitely fitting for an "S" sound.
As Western Greek was adopted by the Etruscans and slowly morphed into the Old Italic alphabets, "sigma" was kept as the /s/ sound, and "san" was brought back around, most likely as the /ʃ/ sound that "shin" had been. By this point, both glyphs had changed. "Σ" lost its bottom stroke, its three lines shifting around each other until they looked pretty familiar (𐌔). Meanwhile, the middle of "M" had this slight, refined curve (𐌑) that differentiated it from the jagged "mu"-spawn (𐌌) which would become our own "M." Once the switch was made to Latin, "𐌑" was phased out entirely, since, like the Greeks, Old Latin had no /ʃ/ phoneme.
How exactly did "sigma" lose that bottom stroke, though? Well, it wasn't a purely Roman invention — across the Western Greek alphabets, "Σ" could actually be written in quite a few different numbers of angles and strokes! One of the most common variants did indeed have three strokes, resembling the Latin "𐌔" quite nicely. Allegedly, four- and three-stroked variants existed side-by-side in the Etruscan alphabet as well. Not only that, in other Italic alphabets, such as Venetic, the "S" glyph could be written with five or even six strokes! After all this fu"ss," it was presumably easy for the Romans to decide to "s"implify things and give "S" three strokes — and, eventually, one continuous curve.
The four-stroked "S" of old persisted in the Futhark runes, with the Sowilō Proto-Germanic rune looking like "ᛊ," which would eventually undergo a similar transmutation and become "ᛋ". Oh, and in the Hellenistic period of Greece, "Σ" was sometimes simplified into a "lunate" form, named as such because it looks like a crescent moon — "C". It's still used widely in Greece today, especially in a religious context, and it gave rise to the "C" of the Cyrillic alphabet, completing the joke that "C" is really "S" and "K" in disguise. Or maybe no one ever makes that joke and it's just me. Okay fine.
Anyway, that's all from me. We already talked about the "long s" (ſ) back in the "F" section, so if you want to see me mention it for like two seconds, scroll back to that. Got that of your system? Yeah? Alright cool, let's move on.
T
Sweet, blissful release — after so many monoliths, this is one of the simplest ones yet. We arrive now at the final letter in the Phoenician abjad, "taw" (𐤕). After so many high-concept hieroglyphic inspirations, like a cow's head and the floor plan to a house and a fence and a tooth and a guy's arm and a guy's head and an eye and maybe a snake, I think it's just fucking hilarious that the precursor to "taw" is believed to be a fucking tally mark. Or, like, two crossed sticks. Either way it meant a "mark."
The Greeks even kept the name the same — "tau" (T)! I guess they lopped the top off and decided to strengthen its foundation, or something. Regardless, "T" stayed the same ever since — from Etruscan to Old Latin to New Latin to, well, now. It's always been the /t/ sound, too. It's the most common consonant, and the second-most common letter period, in English. It's the cross on which Jesus died, and the initial for the tera-unit, representing a trillion of a thing. From title screen to termination, whether we're towering to tiny, we are all "T." And I think that's teautiful.
Well, we've got six letters left, and some of them are absolute motherfuckers! So, I think I need to recharge before I'll feel ready to tackle them. I hope you understand. Honestly, I might not pick up writing about the history of our alphabet for a while — I kind of want to try some other topics now. Who knew looking at the same thing for ten million years could rot your brain? I sure didn't. I've had no experience with such matters. And speaking of matters I have no experience with, time to go live a normal life!
'Til we two devils meet again,
Eph