The world of education is constantly evolving, which means that we are always learning and adapting. In this article, we’ll explore the history of our English alphabet and how it’s changed as we’ve learned more about the world around us.
It’s cool to think about all the symbols that have been lost from our alphabet through history.
The first letter of the Latin alphabet is A, but it wasn’t always that way. In fact, it was originally written as a bar overtop of a vertical line (a bit like an S). The Greeks had their own form of this symbol and called it alpha–which means “first” in Greek. The Romans also borrowed this concept for their alphabet and used it as their first letter as well–but with one small change: they added an extra stroke at its base to make it look more like our modern capital A shape. Today we use both forms interchangeably depending on what language we’re writing or reading; however there are still some languages where only one style works well enough to represent them accurately (like Cyrillic).
Since the 1500s, we’ve lost several symbols from our alphabet.
The history of the alphabet is a winding one, full of twists and turns. It’s worth remembering that our modern 26-letter alphabet didn’t come into existence until around the 16th century. Before then, we had no such thing as an “alphabet”; instead, every letter was represented by its own unique symbol–and some letters had multiple symbols! For example, The Greek letter beta (B) was also represented by an inverted V and another inverted V facing leftward; this second symbol is still used today when writing out Greek letters in math equations or chemical formulas that use Greek characters. In fact, you’ll see it all over Google Translate’s website! The Roman numeral II was often written like this: IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVVVVVVVVIIIIIIIIIIVVVVIIIIXXXXXXVIIIIXXXXXXXIXXXXXIXXXXXIXXXXXIXXXXXIXXX (that’s 24 Xs). This way of representing numbers was eventually replaced with Arabic numerals because they were easier to read than Roman ones; however some people still prefer using Roman numerals today when describing dates or events from history (such as Renaissance art).
We hope this article has helped you to understand a little more about some of the lost letters in our alphabet. There are many more that could have been mentioned here, but we thought these were some of the most interesting ones! We’ll end with one final symbol: ?, which was used in Old English to represent a “hard c” sound like “k”. Today we use it as part of Unicode symbols like ? (U+0E28), which looks like an upside down exclamation point with two dots above it.
