WI Old English Alphabet is still used today

oshron

oshron

i imagine that there wouldnt be any changes that are significant enough to greatly affect the world
 

Awilla the Hun

Some linguist or other once published a little essay about the sort of words there would be if we had kept using Old English. I wish I had his name on me, but there were some pretty interesting ones.
 
iori

iori

Their would probably be a litte more confusion/difficulty learning English as not only do you have the additional letters generally, but some of them look like other letters.
 

Barbarossa Rotbart

Iori said:
Their would probably be a litte more confusion/difficulty learning English as not only do you have the additional letters generally, but some of them look like other letters.
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Well, this problem already exists:
- C and G
- I and l
- O and Q
etc.
You can find many examples for this if you look at common script and other fonts.
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

Barbarossa Rotbart said:
What if the Old English Alphabet is still used today? That means that the letters ash (æ), eth (ð), insular g (ᵹ), thorn (þ), long s (ſ), wynn (ƿ) and yogh (ȝ) are still used today. So my question would look something like this: Ƿhat if þe Old Enᵹliſh Alphabet is ſtill uſed today?

EDIT: the insular g should not look similiar to eth.
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Personally I find the wynn and the thorn annoyingly easy to confuse.

But, ya, we should have kept the thorn. EDIT: See my user name.

Trivia fact. Did you know that it WAS kept until much later than usually recognized? That all those "Ye Olde Coffeeshoppes" are really using a (modern variant) of a thorn, even if they don't realize it?

I always thought that what you're calling insular g and yogh were the same letter. Aha. In fact your link even claims they are. So, no, one or the other will survive, not both.

As for the long s, it doesnt serve any purpose. It's just a positional variation of an 's'. IMO.
 
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LSCatilina

LSCatilina

Mmmm...Some letters actually letters in english and in french as æ.

For the effects, no more than the use of the ~ in some languages (now, mainly spanish and portuguese, but it existed in french too) to mark a disappeared or redundant "n". So i would say, no change worth of mention globally, but it could show some conservatism sign into the culture using it.

For the POD, a better alphabetisation before the massive usage of print would use, as it would force the printers to create specific marks for these letters.
 
Alex Richards

Alex Richards

Donor
LSCatilina said:
Mmmm...Some letters actually letters in english and in french as æ.

For the effects, no more than the use of the ~ in some languages (now, mainly spanish and portuguese, but it existed in french too) to mark a disappeared or redundant "n". So i would say, no change worth of mention globally, but it could show some conservatism sign into the culture using it.

For the POD, a better alphabetisation before the massive usage of print would use, as it would force the printers to create specific marks for these letters.
Click to expand...

Actually, that won't do it, the long s only went out of fashion in the 1700s. See the below Shakespearean folio from 1598 for example. Though if Thorn can survive against 'th' until say 1500 in a style distinct from y it should be able to carry on till the present.

 
Thande

Thande

Donor
An interesting question is whether the eth and the thorn might be standardised so that the eth means hard th (dh) as in "that" while thorn means soft th (th) as in "thin". That might make it a bit easier for foreigners to learn English, for one thing.

Another usage that could easily have survived is the 18th century (and before) use of -'d rather than -ed (as in "Macduff kill'd Macbeth"). Originally it was meant to distinguish between words where the -ed was a slurred schwa rather than fully pronounced (as in "blessed") but there are so few of the latter type of words as pronunciation shifted that it was forgotten.
 

Barbarossa Rotbart

LSCatilina said:
For the POD, a better alphabetisation before the massive usage of print would use, as it would force the printers to create specific marks for these letters.
Click to expand...
The easiest PoD would be if the printing press was not invented in Germany because that's the reason several letters vanished.
 

1940LaSalle

Barbarossa Rotbart said:
What if the Old English Alphabet is still used today? That means that the letters ash (æ), eth (ð), insular g (ᵹ), thorn (þ), long s (ſ), wynn (ƿ) and yogh (ȝ) are still used today. So my question would look something like this: Ƿhat if þe Old Enᵹliſh Alphabet is ſtill uſed today?

EDIT: the insular g should not look similiar to eth.
Click to expand...

The eth and thorn I sort of know (including that the former represents the form "th" found at the beginning of "though" and the latter, as in "thin"). It appears to me that the long s is functionally identical to the short s; it's just an allotrope (to use a chemical analogy) that's found mid-word. Am I correct in surmising that (1) wynn is an Anglo-Saxon equivalent of w, and; (2) the insular g is an allotrope of the form of g we're familar with? No idea what to make of ash and yogh, though: can someone elucidate above and beyond the Wiki articles, please?
 

Dathi THorfinnsson

1940LaSalle said:
The eth and thorn I sort of know (including that the former represents the form "th" found at the beginning of "though" and the latter, as in "thin").
..
It appears to me that the long s is functionally identical to the short s; it's just an allotrope (to use a chemical analogy) that's found mid-word.
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In gross generality, you get þ at the beginning of words and ð in the middle, although that's not a hard and fast rule. Icelandic has dissimilated the two, so that they have the sounds you say. However, it is not unusual, in actual manuscripts, to see them fairly mixed up. Anglo-Saxon, especially, in my limited experience, mixes them more than Icelandic did/does.
Yes, the long 's' is just a stylistic form. It's weird that that survived when the useful ones didn't!
 

Wongo93

German used ß 'es-zet' for double-s (think it' s been dumped recently) as in 'Straße' (Strasse), as did English up to the 17th century.

Brits (usually engineers) at my work were fond of addressing parcels to Max-Planckstrabe, for example, which just annoys the Germans. I've always felt that if you want to annoy the Germans, it should at least be deliberate.

The ß I'm using isn't, actually: it's the Greek letter 'beta'.
 

Barbarossa Rotbart

The difference between long and short s is quite simple:
- short s: end of word, before apostrophe, before and after f, second s in double ss if written in italics
- long s: before a hyphen and everything else

Wynn and insular g are the anglosaxon equivalents to w and Carolingian g.

Ash stands for ae.

Yogh had many meanings. Among them were /y/, /x/ (night was originally written niȝt) and /g/.
 

Barbarossa Rotbart

Wongo93 said:
German used ß 'es-zet' for double-s (think it' s been dumped recently) as in 'Straße' (Strasse), as did English up to the 17th century.
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No, ß still exists in German (exept in Switzerland where it is replaced by 'ss'). Strasse is still not correct. The problem is that there was originally no capital ß, because it cannot appear at the beginning of a word (in German capital letters at the beginning of words is much more common.) Although a capital ß (ẞ) exists since 2007 no one knows that it exists, so you will stille see either STRASSE or STRAßE but never STRAẞE.
 
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