153
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Why are names starting with a "J" common, while words starting with a "J" are uncommon?
A lot of the "J" names in English are from the Bible and would have originally been written with an initial I in Latin, as the letter J did not get started until the Renaissance. In modern ...
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89
votes
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Where does “ö” fall in alphabetical ordering?
TL;DR: Ignore diacritics when sorting English — except to break ties.
When sorting English text — but not the text of various other languages — one does not distinguish letters with and without ...
- 127k
82
votes
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Is "I" an alphabet or a letter?
In standard US and UK usage, an alphabet is a system or collection of letters, a letter being
A written symbol or character representing a speech sound and being a component of an alphabet. [AHD]
In ...
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Is "I" an alphabet or a letter?
Technically, one letter could be an alphabet. By the definition you provided, an alphabet is a set of symbols or letters. This set could theoretically contain any number of letters.
The Latin ...
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15
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Why are names starting with a "J" common, while words starting with a "J" are uncommon?
A further point is that many of these names are essentially the same name. Your list of 18 names:
Jack, Jackie, Jackson, Jill, Janet, Jeremy, Jeremiah, Jake, Jesus, Jacob, Jock, John, Johnny, Jon, ...
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14
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Why does English omit diacritics on foreign names?
I, an ignorant, lazy, hubristic, and (most-importantly) impatient American, need to add this preface, so I will have enough letters for this to be counted as an answer.
One word:
Keyboard
Please, ...
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12
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With character or sign
& comes from a Latin scribal abbreviation for et (⁊ which was used as an alternative to & in Old English and is still used that way in Modern Irish comes from a different form of the same ...
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12
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Is there a collective word for the different "alphabets" used by different languages?
I tend to follow Omniglot and call them writing systems. This is because Omniglot - and I believe linguistics generally - uses different terms depending on certain characteristics of the writing ...
- 6,624
10
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Difference between Letter and Alphabet in English
It may be worth noting that in Indian English, the word alphabet can take on a similar meaning to letter, which can cause confusion.
In standard English, the difference is basically that an alphabet ...
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9
votes
Is there any shorter pronunciation of W than double-U?
The letter W is known in the NATO phonetic alphabet as "whiskey". I am not sure if that counts as "semi-officially accepted" though.
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8
votes
A perfect (honest) pangram that is understandable for a regular native user?
A Google search turned up a number of candidates.
With 28 letters, there are a few which can be made:
Waltz job vexed quick frog nymphs (courtesy of Ronan)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow
...
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8
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Is there a formal spelling for the English letter names?
Formal yes, universal no. Here's one:
We have included each letter with its name and plural below the list of examples. The United States uses zee, while other countries use zed.
A a ...
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7
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Why does English omit diacritics on foreign names?
The answer is obvious: Modern Standard English does not have diacritics. Why would you expect English copy to include non-English characters? If someone wants to write my English name in a non-English ...
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Difference between Letter and Alphabet in English
A letter is a particular symbol used in writing, an alphabet is the set of all the letters.
Here is a letter: A
Here is an alphabet: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
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7
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Is there a collective word for the different "alphabets" used by different languages?
The Unicode standard, and ISO 15924: Codes for the representation of names of scripts use the term script.
So, there is the Latin script, the Han script (which contains the Chinese hànzì / Japanese ...
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7
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Why are names starting with a "J" common, while words starting with a "J" are uncommon?
As pointed out in one of the answers above, the commonest names in English are biblical: John/Johan/Jean/Juan, James/Jacob, Joshua/Jesus, Joseph, Judah/Judas, etc., all of which are Hebrew in origin, ...
- 507
6
votes
What non-alphabetic characters are valid in English spelling?
No. A hyphen can appear in an English word as well. For example:
a five-year-old boy
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6
votes
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NATO and US Finance Spelling alphabets - Which is more commonly used in everyday situations?
It really doesn't matter much what spelling alphabet you stick to, unless you are working in a specific branch of industry where people expect a specific alphabet.
In general, people just want to ...
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Why is the letter "w" not pronounced "double v"?
No. The letter "u" was written like a "v".
From here,
Roman alphabet for Latin
The Romans used just 23 letters to write Latin:
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6
votes
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What Character Was Removed from the Alphabet?
According to the Wikipedia page on the Ampersand, this is true.
The ampersand often appeared as a letter at the end of the Latin alphabet, as for example in Byrhtferð's list of letters from 1011. ...
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6
votes
Meaningful English sentences containing very few distinct letters
This one has four distinct letters:
Madam, I'm Adam.
It's also notable because it is a palindrome, and it was also the first sentence uttered by a human being (joke).
- 5,952
5
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Why does English omit diacritics on foreign names?
As mentioned in comments, since the diacritical markings (and crossed-letter letters) don't (generally and currently) have an analog in English language, the markings will be ignored for the common ...
- 4,035
5
votes
Why does English omit diacritics on foreign names?
In a note appended to the question, the OP says 'I am only talking about names using the Latin alphabet, I am not talking about transliterated names'. This implies that the OP regards it as ...
- 6,235
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Why does English omit diacritics on foreign names?
I think it is an attempt to appropriate the word (into English), and I believe it is quite common (in the sense that this is what language users do and will do).
For example, the name of the German ...
- 6,158
5
votes
Accepted
& as a letter in the alphabet?
According to Wikipedia, the ampersand originated as a ligature in Roman scripts of the letters e an t to represent the Latin word et, meaning and. According to the OED, citing Longman's Magazine (...
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5
votes
Why do some nicknames have no apparent relation with their original counterparts?
While @Josh's answer is good and provides quite a lot of historical background for some of the specific nicknames, it doesn't completely address why, in general, names are truncated: the nicknames you'...
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When did '&' stop being taught alongside the alphabet?
If '&' has ever been a letter of any alphabet, then it involved a very strange idea of what an alphabet it. It is the only 'letter' that that spells only one word, namely the word it 'spells'. ...
- 9,270
5
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Did English have any alphabet or writing before it adopted Latin?
Futhorc was a runic alphabet of Anglo-Saxon tribes that developed out of northwestern Germanic/Scandinavian runes (Elder Futhark). Wikipedia tells us they were likely used to write Old English (Anglo-...
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