Alphabetical by Michael Rosen

‘massage’, as a ‘ch’ as in ‘loch’, or as a modern ‘w’, ‘x’, or ‘y’. In Old English manuscripts you can find it sitting alongside the modern-looking Carolingian ‘g’ doing the same job but also doing these other jobs. Bit by bit, ‘insular G’combined with the ‘yogh’ and eventually disappeared altogether, though it’s used in writing modern Irish.
    7. ETHEL

    This Latin ligature of ‘o’ and ‘e’ survived until the 1960s in words borrowed straight from Latin, like ‘fœtus’ and ‘subpœna’. Originally, it did the job of the double ‘ee’, the longer form of the short sound made in the word ‘kin’. Like ‘ash’, it didn’t make it to recitations of the alphabet. ‘Ethel’ is the name of the rune that was sounded as ‘oe’.
    Sometimes, people who talk of lost letters add some symbols devised for syllables and words, the most common of which is the ampersand. I think this is what philosophers would call a category shift. That’s to say, though these symbols look like letters being used on the alphabetic principle, they belong in reality to a ‘syllabary’ – the kind of writing system that the ancient Sumerians used: phonological but with signs representing that language’s syllables. So, pedantically and fussily, I’m going to leave the ampersand, the ‘that’ and the ‘eng’ to another time, another place.
    Also nudging to take part in this parade of letter-ghosts is the famous long ‘s’ of some early print which looks like an ‘f’ but isn’t an ‘f’ as it has no cross-stroke halfway down its upright, and always indicates an ‘s’ sound, never an ‘f’ sound, even though the letter ‘s’ was available. (See ‘ S is for Signs and Sign Systems ’).

• ‘E’ STARTS OUT life 3,800 years ago as a stick man with two arms but only one central leg, a continuation of his body. This is a Semitic letter probably named as ‘he’ and pronounced ‘h’. By the time the Phoenicians get hold of it in 1000 BCE it looks like a reverse form of our ‘f’ but with two horizontals instead of our one. It’s still pronounced ‘h’. The first ancient Greeks kept this but later either they or the early Romans flipped it. In around 700 BCE the sign came to indicate the sound ‘ee’. The Romans created the serif, thin-thick ‘E’.
    e
    Latin manuscripts from around AD 450 start to show the upright stroke bending into a crescent shape until the top two lines join up. It was this shape that the printers of the 1500s took as the lower-case ‘e’.
    PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME
    The Norman French came to Britain pronouncing it along Etruscan lines as ‘ay’ and the Great Vowel Shift explains how it became ‘ee’.
    PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER
    In almost all counts, ‘e’ comes out as English’s most popular letter and with the rise of emails and e-commerce (‘e’ for electronic) its future at the top of the charts is assured. It’s present in some of the most commonly used words: ‘the’, ‘me’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘we’, ‘they’, ‘them’, ‘her’, ‘hers’, ‘their’, ‘theirs’, ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘where’, ‘some’, ‘same’, ‘are’, ‘be’, ‘have’ and ‘were’, along with many past tenses(ending in ‘-ed’) and plurals ending in ‘-es’ and ‘-ies’. As with all English vowels, ‘e’ is given many jobs to do, very few of which are 100 per cent consistent. We can be sure that in consonant-vowel-consonant formations like ‘peg’ and ‘bet’, it will be pronounced