In the late 1960s, my hometown of Cullman, Alabama, had an incredibly progressive education system. Cullman was a town of about 10,000 souls back then (it boasts over 18,000 today), and it spent a great deal of its city budget on school building and hiring excellent teachers. And, when I was in first grade at East Elementary, the city school system introduced a new way of teaching reading called the Initial Teaching Alphabet–ITA. It was made up of 44 sounds found in standard English. Thus, when I entered first grade, my knowledge of the 26 letters in the English alphabet was almost useless. We had to learn about the 44 letters in ITA. And that brings me to the 26 letters of our alphabet–and the several letters English has lost over the centuries.
Take the letter thorn. Here it is: þ. It looks a little like a cross between a b and a p, doesn’t it? You actually know it without knowing that you know it. As recently as Shakespeare’s time, the thorn was used. It’s supposed to be a replacement for the two letters “th” at the beginnings of words. When printing presses in Europe were used to print books in English, their typesets didn’t have the thorn, so they substituted a “y” instead of the thorn. Eventually, even sign painters used the “y” instead of the thorn. That’s why some signs today say, “Ye Olde Shoe Shoppe” or somesuch. It’s not actually “ye,” it’s actually “the” instead because of the thorn.
Another lost letter is ash, or æ. Again, it’s a sort of mashup of two letters, obviously an a and an e. We have eliminated that letter because, when we use the sound, we either use the two separate letters (archaeology, for example) or we in the US have eliminated the “e” from the equation (encyclopedia rather than encyclopaedia).
Then, there’s ð, called eth. It’s more like the thorn, but where thorn is less tongued in pronunciation, eth fully uses the tongue between your teeth to make, well the -th sound in teeth. Eventually, English speakers replaced eth with the thorn when writing and eventually replaced the thorn with a th.
There are others also lost to history. And that brings me back to ITA. Several lost letters in English were used by the ITA creators to represent sounds that the 26 standard alphabet makes. I knew what an eth was and an ash was because of ITA. But the language system didn’t last long. Too many children had difficulty making the transition from ITA back to the standard English alphabet when reading books outside of ITA classrooms. But the experiment serves to remind us that our language is evolving. There are some who are proposing a simplified English alphabet that more closely aligns with standardized pronunciations. That may mean either adding to or taking away certain letters in our standard 26 letter alphabet.
For example, there is the word GHOTI. Ask someone to pronounce it, and they’ll most likely say “go-tee” as in the word goatee. But this word has been used to demonstrate that English is finicky when it comes to the randomness of its pronunciation rules. Some have argued that if you take the -gh from rough, the -o- from women, and the -ti- from either nation or ration, you can say the word in a completely different but nonetheless perfectly acceptable way.
Fish.
The Rest of the Story 