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Kindred in sound and in lineage: the Hebrew letter qof and the Arabic qaf . While not similar in shape, they both derive from the ancient Phoenician Q letter. Both these modern Semitic Q letters are distinct from the K letters of their respective alphabets, as send ing the tongue to a different part of the roof of the mouth. In Arabic, for example, qalb means “heart” while kalb , pronounced slightly differently, means “dog.”
The big loser in the three-way turf war is Q, nearly the least-used letter in English print. K fares badly too, standing at about number 22 or 21 in frequency of use, fourth or fifth to last. C stands at around number 13. From K’s viewpoint, C hogs the limelight and quite undeservingly—for C is far less consistent in sound than K (or Q). The C turns to “s” before E, I, or Y, while K is always “k".
The arrival of print finalized the alphabet in other ways, too. The little i now got its dot; the use in England of Old English letters yogh and thorn became greatly reduced, as these shapes did not exist in continental-made letter casts; and so on. Most important, print mechanics demanded that letter shapes be uniform in size and consistent in style within a typeface. Variant or fancy letter shapes had to be used sparingly, for an obvious reason: Letters now came from laboriously produced metal casts, not from the tip of a pen.
Originally the keyboard was designed to slow the typist down. Letter-wise, our familiar keyboard is basically unchanged from the earliest specimens of the 1870s, exemplified in the 1874 Remington manual typewriter, the first commercially successful one. This keyboard deliberately forces the typist’s fingers to stretch to find the likely letter combinations of English. The purpose in 1874 was to help prevent jamming.
The Q key is safely distant from the key of Q’s constant companion—the letter U. In English, we almost never write Q without writing U next to it; thus, Q is a left-hand key while U is a right-hand one. And although technology has since banished the jamming problem, the keyboard design is too deeply entrenched ever to change.
Choosing a handful of Phoenician letters whose consonantal sounds were unneeded for Greek, the Greeks reassigned these to be vowels. One letter affected was he, which now became the Greek E vowel.
At first, the Greek letter stood for both long and short E. Later the letter would be specialized as short E only, and another Greek letter, named eta, would be developed for long E. Eventually, the old short-E letter would receive the Greek name e psilon (or epsilon ), “naked E.”
Evidence shows that by the late Roman Empire (A.D. 300), Roman Y was being pronounced the same as Roman I. This overlap prompted a new name for Roman Y: i graeca (pronounced “ee grye-ca”), meaning “Greek I.” Today the name survives in the French and Spanish names for Y: i grec and i griega.
The emergence of Romance languages invited the use of Z for the sounds “ts” or “tz,” common in Old French and Italian. Z spread modestly through medieval French-language spelling circles, both in France and in Norman England; in both countries, Z’s sound slurred eventually to our “z.” Z’s rival for this sound was the letter S—a rivalry still seen in such alternative spellings as British “analyse” and American “analyze.” By 1600, S was the clear winner and Z was rare in printed English.
Surprisingly, the Roman numeral L, meaning 50, does not abbreviate a word (the Latin for 50 was quinquaginta ) but rather is thought to commemorate a primitive Roman symbol, a numeral, that became standardized as the letter L shape. The same holds true for the puzzling Roman V for 5, X for 10, and D for 500, none of which stands for a Latin word. However, M for 1,000 did abbreviate the Latin word mille, while C for 100 evidently began as an abstract symbol that over time became “attracted” to the appropriate letter shape for abbreviating the Latin centum.
Thr medieval i originally had no dot but acquired one because the letter as a hatless stroke was hard to distinguish on a crowded page of handwriting. Another way in which medieval writers solved the “i-legibility” problem was to substitute a minuscule letter y, as it was easier to read. Thus, “his” might be spelled as “hys,” for example. This expedient led to the increased popularity of letter Y and to its rise as a challenger to I in medieval and Renaissance English spellings.
Webster envisioned a distinctly American language, to help unite the new nation and make it independent of Britain’s printing presses and other cultural influences. This American language he sought to engineer, personally, through his writings and lectures. At a time when English-language spellings were still fluid, Webster compiled his dictionary with an eye toward establishing consistent spelling rules that would create differences between American and British English.