How Geography KILLED a Letter

English is a global language throughout the world. 378 million people speak it as their mother tongue, mainly in places like the United Kingdom or the United States. Another 400 million people use it as a secondary language. Think of places like India or South Africa and most other English colonies where English. It had a history there, but never completely replaced the local language, plus another 344 million people have the ability to speak English as a foreign language. Think of places like China or Japan, where English is taught, as another skill to better integrate people. the world of business and other activities in all that makes there 1.1 billion English speakers worldwide and, while it still has fewer native speakers than Chinese and Spanish in terms of total speakers, English is the most popular language on the planet and has become a kind of lingua franca. or the common language of the world is so well known to so many people, some are surprised to learn that the English alphabet used to contain more

letter

s and, in fact, one of the most common sounds in English once had a

letter

of its own to greet the forgotten .

English language letter thorne looks like a lowercase b and p fused together except that is not the sound it makes today in English we use the diagraph th to represent just one sound, but 700 years ago we only used thorn and this was an extremely useful letter for let's use sound all the time. Heck, I've already used it 36 ​​times since I started this video, but more than that in Middle English and even Early Modern English, thorn was used everywhere and there were even abbreviations that used thorne to mean words like this, that and you , the word that also had its own letter at one point, which was just a thorn with the bump through its ascender like a t, but that was kind of short-lived, so what happened to Thorne's surprisingly response is related to

geography

in the year 1439, a German goldsmith named johannes gutenberg created something that revolutionized information and, therefore, the world, by assembling hand-molded metal matrices, created a fast and precise mechanism through which could print and reprint type efficiently. he sheets of paper or, in short, he invented the first true printing press with the ability to quickly print texts such as books and especially bibles.

The transfer of ideas and information became rapid throughout Europe. It is analogous to the impact the Internet has had on our time and changes. caused by this development deserve a video of their own, but what does all this have to do with Thorne lyrics or

geography

? Well, I mentioned before that Gutenberg was German and therefore Germany was where most of the early printing presses were produced. and operated, I also mentioned that the parts used in the press were mostly handmade by Germans as well, but then by Italians, also a quick look at the German alphabet and German words reveals a complete lack of any sounds in their language, in fact, modern German. the language is completely devoid of the thorn sound, that's why Germans in English don't think they have a good German accent other than mine, they will remove the th sound in favor of a z or s sound, so I would say something like thought.

It was thinking that, in theory, a German would say that it is so fast to sink in theory and I feel sorry for the Germans who saw that they had to listen to that, but you get the idea well, here is one more example, we are thinking, we are thinking, Hello, this is the German coast guard we're thinking we're thinking what are you thinking so when the English gave the Germans their documents and books to print, a letter kept coming up that they didn't have a piece because they didn't use it, but they were too smart to just leave out the letter, so the Germans used what they thought was the next best letter, so since they resembled each other and weren't used very often, confusion would be kept to a minimum. old signs that say old, whatever exists, it wasn't actually pronounced yi, they just didn't have the correct letter at the time to say v, this is also where the word tú comes from, as it was previously thu or you, but the we kept. spelling and pronunciation for some reason, then because just using and created some confusing words, like imagine trying to spell the word thigh or time or worthy, the th came to help alleviate the confusion and that's how thorn died.

What is also interesting is that english is actually a germanic language closely related to modern german, in fact the people who eventually became english or english are originally from the north coast of germany and from a place called anglia or in german england that's right most english people are basically just germans and while they lived in mainland europe their languages ​​were more or less similar if not exactly the same it was only once the angles migrated across the channel of La Mancha due to the collapse of the Roman Empire and the more fertile lands that their language began to feature the sound of thorns, while it never developed on the continent.

Germans I should note that two other groups, the Saxons and the Jutes from roughly the same area, also came during this time. These three Germanic tribes merged with the Anglo-Saxons and the Jutes and dominated the south and east of Britain and it was only because the Anglo-Saxons. The Saxons were isolated geographically, the thorne letter was used first and also outside, so you could say that geography created and destroyed the thorne letter in English anyway in another way, however, geography has also preserved the thorne letter in only one Today, there is still a branch of only one language, and that is Icelandic because Iceland is very isolated geographically from Germany and the whole printing revolution, Thore was never altered as to why there, even modern Icelanders will use Thore in their writing and even their computer keyboards feature the letter.

They also still use a very similar letter f that makes practically the same sound, so in English it was absorbed by a thorn at some point. It's the difference between the nth sound of the thing that Icelanders would spell with a thorn and this one that they would spell with an f, yeah I don't really hear it but maybe for the Irish who came up with the f and now the x-landers there is a noticeable difference, so there you have it, this is how geography created, destroyed and preserved. the letter thorn, so what do you think we should go back to using thorne?

Are there any other lyrics you think we should stop using? Let me know in the comments below if you like this video. Hey, why not give it a big like and subscribe? While you're at it, I'll be back next week with another video, thanks.