The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh

Lost and “missing” letters (yogh, wynn, thorn, etc.)

• Yogh’s legacy shows up in Scots names like Menzies being pronounced “Ming-is”; this extends to brand and political nicknames.
• Several commenters want to revive Old English letters:
  • þ / ð for the two “th” sounds,
  • æ for /æ/,
  • ᵹ for soft “g” (as in gem), which would also “solve” the GIF joke.
• Wynn is mourned as a nicer name for W; some joke about “WynnDOS.”
• Others note that some “lost” letters (þ, ð) still exist in modern languages like Icelandic.

Keyboard and naming tangent

• Side-thread maps OS-independent names to keys: Ctrl, Alt/Meta, Super/Windows/Command, Option, etc., noting confusion over what counts as Meta vs Super across systems.

Script history and convergent shapes

• Comparisons between Old English ᵹ and Georgian letters raise the issue of similar glyphs arising independently as scripts simplify strokes.
• A mini-genealogy traces Latin and Greek alphabets back to Phoenician and ultimately Egyptian; once one culture writes, neighbors tend to adapt that script.
• Commenters stress that similar-looking letters do not imply close linguistic relation.

English spelling chaos and reform ideas

• Many condemn English spelling: silent letters, inconsistent sound–symbol mapping, and extreme cases like “ough.”
• One long argument ties non-phonetic spelling to low US literacy, likening English word learning to memorizing kanji “chunks” rather than decoding.
• Proposals include:
  • Eliminating or repurposing C, Q, X (e.g., k/s instead of c; x or c for /ʃ/; dedicated symbols for /ʧ/, /ʤ/, /ʒ/, voiced vs voiceless “th”).
  • Gradual reform: regularize “-ough”, drop silent letters, standardize digraphs, eventually add new letters or diacritics.
  • Pointing to experimental systems like ITA and alternative alphabets like Shavian.

Arguments against phonetic reform

• Several respond that English orthography:
  • Preserves etymology and word history (e.g., debt from Latin debitum).
  • Helps disambiguate homophones in writing (cent/scent/sent, cite/site/sight).
  • Provides a shared written standard across highly divergent accents (e.g., marry/Mary/merry, bag/beg, caught/cot).
• Others note that even “phonetic” systems drift as speech changes (examples from French, Tibetan, Burmese, Hangul).
• Some explicitly reject the “English ~ kanji” comparison as overstated, especially from the perspective of people who have learned both logographic and alphabetic systems.

Cross-linguistic phonology and fun examples

• Many comparisons show how cognates diverged:
  • German/Dutch lachen/Nacht/Tochter vs English laugh/night/daughter; Dutch and Scots harsh /x/ vs English silent “gh.”
  • Dutch and German shifts where historical /g/ or /ɣ/ became /j/ in English (weg/weg → way; gestern → yesterday).
  • Danish keeps /k/ in knæ where English lost it in knee.
• Discussions of rare or marked sounds:
  • English/Spanish θ (thorn-like) being typologically rare despite many speakers.
  • Welsh and Southern African lateral fricatives and clicks; special historical letters for these.
  • Indian scripts’ rich nasal inventories and overspecified glyph sets, with debate over how phonemic they really are.

Phonetic spelling in practice and child learners

• Children’s early spellings (e.g., “my daddy and i tocd on d woki toki”) are cited as evidence that a phonetic English would be consistent and intuitive.
• Others counter that spelling also encodes etymology and serves as a stable reference amid spoken variation, and that most fluent readers are unaware of irregularities in day-to-day use.