What letter is 'missing' in our alphabet?
Asked by
rebbel (
35553
)
December 26th, 2011
Obviously, none is missing, but for the sake of fun (or for your sake, because you really think there should be an extra letter) let us assume there could be twenty seven instead of twenty six letters in our alphabet (for the question I use the Roman alphabet).
Maybe a contraction of two letters that we use regularly, or a new letter alltogether?
Since there doesn’t seem to be the ability to write your new letter down here, try to explain it; both how it sounds and what it should look like.
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17 Answers
something for “sh”.
something for “ch”.
something for “th”.
For “th” we could adopt theta from the Greeks.
The letter that sounds like when you stick your tongue out, and make the farting noise… Because I’d like to know how to spell that.
ßäöü
in yours, that is. our alphabet is superior.
We’ve got U and W so I say way continue the trend and have a WU (triple U)
The phlematic “Ch” sound found in Hebrew and Arabic.
The “rrrr” sound in French. It is so rrromantic.
ghoti is pronounced fish.
The gh from rough is F
The o from women is I
The ti from fiction is SH
I used to know someone who said his name was spelled Lar3ry.
He said the 3 was silent.
~The silent one. Like…. .
We could bring back the letter thorn: þorn. Þat þing þinks þin þoughts.
@DominicX Does anyone know why that letter disappeared in the first place? Neither the “t” nor the “h” sound really close to the “th”.
@PhiNotPi It happened because of Greek’s influence. In Ancient Greek, the letter theta was pronounced as /t/ sound with a puff of air afterward, an aspirated t. So when Greek words came into Latin, the Romans spelled it “th” to represent /t/ with a puff of air afterward. In later Greek, the letter theta came to represent the /θ/ sound as in the word “think” and so the “th” in the Greek words in Latin came to be pronounced as /θ/. When the Normans came to England, they used “th” to represent the /θ/ sound in English since they didn’t use thorn and it was already used to represent that sound in Greek/Latin.
It’s the same story for the “ph” in “phone”.
The “rrrr” sound in French.
Which is very different from the “RRRRR” characteristic of Pirate.
I notice we don’t have an alphabet to denote an “ng” sound, especially when the sound occurs at the beginning of a word, as in Vietnamese names like Ngoc Pham. But I can’t think of any English word that begins with the “ng” sound, so maybe having an alphabet like that is not necessary.
@MRSHINYSHOES Early government computer databases were unable to handle people named Ng because of no vowel.
The Welsh alphabet is full of two letter contractions…. If I remember correctly the Welsh alphabet is:
a b c ch d dd e f ff g ng h i l ll m n o p ph r rh s t th u w y…....
The dd is like the hard sound at the beginning of the word “the”...
The f is actually a v sound
The ff is the same as an f in the word “found”
The ng is usually used as a mutation at the beginning of a word, and is usually followed by the letter h… so “fy nghi” meaning “my dog”, with nghi being pronounced as you would guess from reading it
ph becomes and f sound
rh is just a breathy r sound
th is soft, as in “think”
ch and ll are too hard to describe!
Since this question was asked during the Christmas season, I have to ask if there is No L.
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