Many hundreds of years ago, the English alphabet had 29 letters. We have lost 3 in English, but 2 are kept in Icelandic, who keep the Thorn capital Þ small þ, for a soft TH as in 'thorn' itself, and an Eth ð for a hard TH, as in 'the'. This led to the mistaken pronunciation of 'ye' for 'the'. Originally spelt ðe, printers started using a y instead to save type, and this was assumed to be 'ye'.
The 3rd letter, which just survived in a few Gaelic names and words is the 'Yogh' 3 (more or less), pronounced more or less 'Yh'. However, anyone who has heard of the UK Labour Member of parliament Tam Dalziel will know it's pronounced 'Diell'. This is not an abbreviation like 'Featherstonehaugh' ending up as 'Fanshaw', but because the z is actually a Yogh and continues to keep its pronunciation. It's also in Menzies, pronounced 'Mingiz', and the commoner name Mackenzie. They should really be spelt with a Yogh, Dal3iel, Men3ies and Macken3ie, and then they would be pronounced correctly (as long as you knew the letter). It is also kept in Irish Gaelic, though their letter 3 is used as a 'G', as in Corcaig3, for Corcaigh (Cork in Gaelic) but originates from the same character.

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Later Scottish scribes, unfamiliar with the older alphabet, sometimes used z to represent the sound of yogh, e.g. in words like capercailzie (a kind of grouse) or the Scottish legal term tailzie.

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Added from Tom's post (Combined PhD thesis being prepared here)
UPDATE Letter 30: Ezh, looks like a number 3 with a flat top like the one on your keyboard. This was a medieval letter pronounced either dz or zh, but unlike the other 3 extras, doesn't survive anywhere modern I know of. I don't know when it was dropped or any words that used it, but I had to add it to be complete.
There were also many earlier letters but not relevant to current usage such as wynn and hwair.
If I can find an authentic Yogh, I'll put it in.

The Icelandic letters were also once part of the Runic alphabet, used by the Vikings, which is how they entered the Icelandic language. Funny you should use 3 in place of Z in those words, for 3 is Z n the Russian Cyrillic alphabet!

And, of course, V and U were once one and the same in Latin, which is why we pronounce W as "double-U"!

tjoeb};>

Off topic a little but I used to have a last name that had two consecutive u's in it.
That is most difficult when trying to spell it out aloud. You can't say ' double u' because people will write down 'w' and you can't say 'u', 'u' because people think you are repeating yourself.

So your name used to be Vacuum??!!

Heavens no!

It was Triduum (last three days of Lent); or was it menstruum (A solvent, especially one used in extracting compounds from plant and animal tissues and preparing drugs)?

No, it was continuum of course and if you can find any more words of uu you will be doing well.

Sorry satguru, I seem to have hijacked your thread, however I did find this snippet.

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I can't think of many other words spelled with double U, apart from
more or less technical Latin terms like `residuum'.


Yes, the letter W originated as a double-U, whence its name. It
happened like this. The classical Latin alphabet did not distinguish
between the letters U and V, which were merely variants of a single
letter. This letter was used by the Romans to spell both the vowel
/u/ and the similar-sounding consonant /w/: hence CUM `with' and
AMICUS `friend', but UINUM (or VINUM) `wine'. But in late Latin the
pronunciation of /w/ shifted to /v/, and the letter V therefore came
to be the normal spelling of the sound /v/.



Consequently, when English-speakers adopted the Roman alphabet, they
found no letter there for their consonant /w/. For a while, they
therefore spelled this sound with the runic letter wynn, which I
can't print here; this was simply the letter used to spell /w/ in the
earlier runic alphabet. But an alternative arose: writing the letter
U / V twice. Hence UU or VV (no difference, remember) became another
way of spelling /w/, and this option became fixed by the introduction
of printing, since the imported European fonts lacked the wynn.


Eventually the double letter came to be taken as a single letter, and
so our alphabet acquired the new letter W, whose form is taken from
the VV version, but whose name is taken from the UU version.
Eventually, of course, the two shapes U and V became separated, the
first for the vowel, the second for the consonant. So all of the
letters U, V and W derive from a single Roman letter.



Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
England

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From: http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-1998.7/msg00001.html

Go for it Exit10, that's what it's all about. The more responses, the merrier. Fascinating extract as well, I didn't know that before.

Very interesting subject, satguru!

A little off-topic, but these two letters (þ, ð) are used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), although this letter (þ) is a little different in this alphabet.
The IPA is usually studied by people who don't have English as their mother tongue language. Phonetics and Phonology are very interesting subjects, although they are not easy to learn! At least to me... but I like them
Here is the link to the International Phonetic Association wesbite. It's a very interesting site:
International Phonetic Association

Not off topic at all Minkpenny!
The vastly longer phonetic alphabet is also used in normal English dictionaries to give the correct pronunciation with an index at the front, but the three letters I mentioned are the only ones I know of that were used in the conventional alphabet, the rest being designed especially for eg different vowel sounds or variations of similar consonant sounds, assigning a single character to each rather than have to try and spell out dipthongs etc. in full. As eth and thorn already referred to those sounds, they could retain them. (Maybe Mr Schwarzenegger should use it to learn to say the word 'California' properly ).

Ohh satguru, so people who have English as their mother tongue also check the phonetic forms of words to see how they are pronounced? I'm sure that mustn't happen very often though, since people who speak English pronounce words correctly, right? Or do they sometimes pronounce words in English wrongly? I don't know about this, so I would like to know, really

Oh and I still have to hear Arnold Schwarzenegger pronounce "California" lol

I don't know how many people actually check the phonetics, but they are there in case. There are plenty of lesser used, complex or foreign origin words that are mispronounced and also words spelt the same but sound different, so have to be differentiated. They just showed a TV programme tonight where the word 'cache' was said in 3 different ways. There are also words you often see written down, but rarely say.
So it's mainly useful for difficult words and people learning English.

Some people actually find this fascinating enough to write dissertations on it. See this essay on these letters if you have the patience of a saint. There are other threads on the subject linked from there as well. Happy reading

Thank you for that link, satguru! It is very interesting, indeed. It might actually help me for the final exam on Phonology that I have next week

Typical, nothing new under the sun I suppose- my occasional trawl through the archives produced this thread from two years ago where a certain Tabby Tom said all of my post here already! (And thanks for not mentioning it as well!).
There are some nice details on their uses as well, so if you look here and scroll to the last post on the page, you can see what is chapter one of old letters and their usage, where mine would now be two.

Since the recent rise to fame of Menzies Campbell (written with a Yogh, not a Z, and pronounced 'Mingiz'), an expert on the Gaelic alphabet was brought onto 'Word of Mouth', one of my favourite radio programmes, to explain the reason to everyone.
What happened was printers, unfamiliar with or unwilling to use all the extra letters which were Gaelic rather than Latin used the nearest thing to them, and as a result we have many Scottish names spelt differently to how they sound, or worse still, like Mackenzie, now replace the old sound with the new.

But her best contribution for me was the first actual word (as opposed to a name) that had a yogh in it, the bird capercaillie. How the letter became a double l is down to the laziness of a printer, but that's what it stands for, so would sound more like a y.

Could the double L have something to do with another language? I mean, I don't know when the word transitioned to have two L's instead of the yogh, but I do know that the Spanish taught in American schools includes a Y pronunciation for the double-L configuration. I also don't know if that's a Spanish inclusion in the language or something more Mexican, since the Spanish taught in American schools is heavily influenced by Mexican dialect, since most Americans who use Spanish will be speaking to Mexicans rather than people from Spain. Still, if it IS an element of European Spanish, and it has been that way for a time, perhaps a lazy printer some time ago figured that since there was a convention for the double-L having a Y sound, it would be better to spell it that way that simply make up a set of letters to replace the yogh.

Also, I'm interested: Since English is a Germanic language (arguably heavily influenced by romance languages, of course) was there ever an S-zett or something similar in old English? That's a letter that looks a little like a fancy uppercase B, and is often represented in modern words as double-S. Like my Oma's maiden name: Greissle, actually has an S-zett in it.

I've checked the answer for the bird, and it's a very simple explanation, it can (and should) be spelt capercail3ie, the other being a form that seems to have taken over as it looks closer to the pronunciation.
The letter was used in Scotland later than in England and English printers perceived a similarity between the <3> and the italic form of z and substituted the latter. Then the italic form was stopped altogether, and the normal z used, which in many cases altered the common pronunciation of many Scottish names such as Macken3ie, replacing the original yogh sound with a z as well as the letter. In the bird the pronunciation has at least been retained by substituting a new letter to stop people putting in a 'z' sound.

By the way, though I can get all the 'th' letters directly, I can only currently use a number 3 for a yogh as every character map I've found has no yogh. In Ireland however, the yogh was transformed into their local form of a g, using its similarity to an italic g rather than z, but actually sounded as a yogh (complicated but accurate!), the most well known being in the Gaelic version of Cork, which is Corcai3h, the -ai3h either being pronounced '-ee', or in some parts silent altogether, which is a regional variation. Though most Irish people would call it a letter G it has probably always been a yogh but due to totally different letter group pronunciation was able to keep the extra letter and share the name as well as the pronunciation with g.

People have actually written complex academic papers on these issues, and still can't all totally agree on how some letters became transformed or lost!