David Sacks Gönderileri
David Sacks kitaplarını, David Sacks sözleri ve alıntılarını, David Sacks yazarlarını, David Sacks yorumları ve incelemelerini 1000Kitap'ta bulabilirsiniz.
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.
The spread of printing in Britain in the 1500s removed the legibility issue and had a standardizing effect that gradually returned many word spellings to I. Today the old Y versus I rivalry can still be glimpsed in such alternative spellings as flyer/flier, cyper/cipher, and tyre/tire.
Yet the medieval Y fad did leave one large legacy: Y’s plum job representing any final “i” sound in English. Today we use a “-y” suffix that encompasses four diverse categories: (1) adjectival forms of Old English words (stony, mighty, my); (2) nouns from Greek, Latin, or Old French that originally had endings like -ia, -ium, or -ie (empathy, remedy, tally); (3) other anglicizations (Henry, from French Henri); and (4) certain diminutives (Jimmy, kitty, dummy).
Scribes would often substitute Y for I as a way to break up a row of pen strokes that otherwise would be difficult to read. For instance, the Latin word for “impassable,” written as inuium in medieval script, would be a bunch of short strokes; by spelling it ynuyum , the writer made it more legible.
Medieval Y was often dotted, suggesting a form of I. Likewise Y’s peculiar English name “wye”—dating from the Middle Ages and never adequately explained—seems to relate to letter I.
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.
Around A.D. 100, some 700 years after the Roman alphabet had been created, the Romans added two more letters, which are our Y and Z. The two were copied directly from the Athenian Greek alphabet of the day. Z was the Greek consonant zeta; Y was the vowel upsilon (again). The Romans imported them to help transliterate Greek words into Latin, a need created by the influx of Greek technical and cultural vocabulary into Rome during prior centuries.
Matematikte X neden bilinmeyen?
For the many equations in his now-famous 1637 mathematical work La Géométrie, René Descartes chose letters A, B, and C to represent any three constants and X, Y, and Z to represent any three unknown quantities. He intended that Z be the first unknown (corresponding to A), with Y second and X third.
But the story goes that the printer, while typesetting the manuscript, found himself repeatedly running short of letter blocks for Y and Z, due in part to Descartes’ many equations calling for these letters. However, the printer still had plenty of X’s, a letter that in French-language print is used far less than Y or Z.
So the printer wrote to Descartes, asking whether it made any difference which of the three, Z, Y, or X, appeared in equations of one or two unknowns—and might X be the preferred letter for printing purposes? The great man replied that this was acceptable.
X's “ks” sound occurred at the middle or end of Old English words, not at the beginning. Today the Anglo-Saxon sound is retained in old words like “Saxon,” “ox,” and “mix,” while words delivered through Norman French may have a softer X (luxury, anxious) or not (tax, execute). At the start of a word, X takes yet a softer sound: “z,” as in “xylophone.” Most modern English words starting with X derive from ancient Greek.
The W fared less well in southern Europe. The sound “w” having largely departed from late Latin, the Romance languages of 1600 were in no desperate need of a new letter in this category. The legacy of ancient consonantal U sufficed to cover surviving “w” sounds, as in Italian Guido or Spanish iguana. To this day, W is not properly a letter of the Italian or Spanish alphabets, although it is employed to render foreign words already in print.
French, likewise, was very reluctant over W. French got along fine with consonantal U to show “w,” as in the word suave (which English shares). To show an initial “w,” French employed the combination OU-, as in oui, meaning “yes,” or ouest, pronounced “west,” meaning “west.” Not until the late 19th century was W accepted into the French alphabet, the last to arrive. Today French W remains rarely used, except for foreign-derived names and English-borrowed words.
By 1000, in Viking-occupied Normandy in France, the infusion of Scandinavian vocabulary had created Norman French words that used “w” while Parisian French did not. Particularly, Norman “w” might occur as an opening sound in place of mainstream French “g.”
For example, the medieval Norman French word for a document granting authority or security was warant (ancestor of our “warrant”). This was a variant of the French word guarant (as in “guarantee”). Similarly, a Norman French border castle might have a wardein named William, earning a wage and ready for warre, whereas on the royal French side the same thing would be guarden Guillaume with his gage, ready for guerre.