1657: History of Letter-Divergence Jun 28, 2019

The history of typography, and specifically what led to the modern English alphabet, is well known, but the history of each letter is often messier. For instance, many of the letters used by the ancient Phoenicians have a one-to-one correspondence with what developed into the letters we use today, but some only became distinct later, such as C and G, which were the same until the Romans adopted the system, similar to how I and J split after the Romans. More strangely perhaps, F shares an ancestor with Y and U, and by extension V and W. This was long enough ago however—far older than even the C-G split—that the sounds they represent have separated greatly. Scholars of Latin will know though that even then there was a great deal of overlap in the pronunciation of U and later V, and there was no difference then in spelling.

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