Ranch Dressing and Other Modern Inventions
There are many things in this world that are older than you might think. For example, the Pope’s title of “Pontiff” predates Christianity by almost a millennium. The mouse driven computer with a mouse,...
Tagged: alphabets
Lost Letters: New Alphabets
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve looked at letters of the alphabet that didn’t quite make the cut. Some of the these letters were added to the alphabet and later dropped. Others were...
Lost Letters: Modern Spelling Reforms
Over the centuries, many spelling reforms have tried to add new letters to the alphabet. Given that the Emperor Claudius couldn’t pull this off, you might think that no new letters have been added...
Lost Letters: Old English Letters
In previous installments of this series, we’ve looked at letters of the alphabet made and lost in the days of ancient Greece and Rome. Now let’s look at some of the Old English Letters...
Lost Letters: The Claudian Letters
Last week, we looked at some of the letters dropped from the Greek Alphabet — letters that never even made it into Latin. This week, we’ll look at the Claudian Letters, three new letters...
Lost Letters: The Greek Alphabet
Why does the English Alphabet have 26 letters? There’s nothing magical or important about that number. In fact, there’s nothing special about the 26 letters we ended up with. It’s just an accident of...
Spelling Reform
English Spelling is screwed up. Though if you’re literate enough to read this sentence, you probably already know that. Even if you won your elementary school spelling bee, you’ve almost certainly come across words...
Media and Writing Systems
I’ve noticed that writing systems are affected by the media on which they are written. This explains a lot from the shape of specific fonts to the form of entire writing systems. Let’s take...
