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The original name of the letter "Sigma" may have been san, but due to the early history of the Greek epichoric alphabets, "san" came to be identified as a separate letter, Ϻ. [3] Herodotus reported that "san" was the name given by the Dorians to the same letter called "Sigma" by the Ionians .
A letter is a type of grapheme, the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes, the smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words.
The letter eth (Ð ð) was later devised as a modification of dee (D d), and finally yogh (Ȝ ȝ) was created by Norman scribes from the insular g in Old English and Irish, and used alongside their Carolingian g. The a-e ligature ash (Æ æ) was adopted as a letter in its own right, named after a futhorc rune æsc.
The long s, ſ , also known as the medial s or initial s, is an archaic form of the lowercase letter s , found mostly in works from the late 8th to early 19th centuries. It replaced one or both [ a ] of the letters s in a double- s sequence (e.g., "ſinfulneſs" for "sinfulness" and "poſſeſs" or "poſseſs" for "possess", but never ...
A language may represent a given phoneme by combinations of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs, and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. German uses the tetragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme German pronunciation: and (in a few borrowed words) "dsch" for [dʒ]. [87]
Former letter of the English, German, Sorbian, and Latvian alphabets Ꟊ ꟊ S with short stroke overlay Used for tau gallicum in Gaulish [10] S with diagonal stroke Used for Cupeño and Luiseño [30] Ꞅ ꞅ Insular S Variant of s [9] [3] Ƨ: Reversed S (=Tone two) A letter used in the Zhuang language from 1957 to 1986 to indicate its ...
Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon, then to left-to-right writing. Global distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main ...
Long s (ſ), a form of the lower-case letter s formerly used where "s" occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a word-s, a suffix added to some English surnames, originally meaning "son of" s, the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for a voiceless alveolar sibilant sound; S, the subject of an intransitive verb; Ѕ, the Cyrillic letter Dze