Thanks to a video recording by TikTok creator@zachdfilms3 , people are learning that there used to be 27 letter of the English ABC’s , rather than the current 26 .
The television explain that the 27th missive of the alphabet is " ampersand " , as denoted by " & " .
" This is an ampersand and trust it or not it used to be the twenty-seventh letter in the ABCs , you see back in the Clarence Shepard Day Jr. this symbol came after the letter Z and signified the word ' and ' , " zachdfilms3 said in the telecasting , perThe Mirror .
" But when recite the alphabet , students were n’t allowed to just say ' and ' after Z. Instead they were taught to differentiate the symbolization by saying ' per se ' before it , it sounded something like this Q gas constant S thymine uranium V W X Y Z & . And ' per se & ' ampersand . "
According toEncyclopedia Britannica , the varsity letter feature in nursery rhymes learn to children : " X , Y , and ampersand / All bid for a bit in hand . ” By the end of the 19th Century , ampersand fell out of the ABC’s , having only first seem in the English language in 1835 . Still , it was briefly a member of the alphabet , which is more than you may say about π .
This is n’t the only alphabetic character that has been lost in time . Languages grow and acquire , and English has really fall behind a few letters along the direction , while not gaining U and J until the 1500s . These drop off lettersincludethorn ( þ ) – a gentle " th " sound – and Wynn ( ƿ ) , which was replaced by " uu " , before this was superseded by " atomic number 74 " .
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Ethel ( Œ ) – pronouncedlike the " oi " in " oil " – has also been lost , in favor of using vowel combinations to get the same line of work done . Yogh ( ȝ ) was in short a way to refer the " ch " sounds , as receive at the end of " loch " , but was soon abandoned , and the specific strait it announce rarely used in English anymore .
So , will we lose any more letters ? Perhaps , perhaps not .
“ Standardized spelling makes it less potential for that to happen than when Middle English was turn into Modern English , ” Anne Babson , an English instructor at Southeastern Louisiana University with a background signal in Late Medieval European languages , toldReader ’s Digest .
“ Most of our high schooltime English teacher would roll over in their grave if ‘ spry ’ became permanently ‘ quik . ’ That said , it ’s not impossible that we will simplify the orthography of many words the direction the ‘ drive thru ’ has done . ”
We do n’t require to indicate any fingers , but " x " has n’t been pulling its weight .
