English language

The English language is a West Germanic language that began in Britain. Due to european imperialism, English has become the global lingua franca, and is the most common second language learned. English is the third most spoken native language, after Mandarin and Spanish

English is named after the Angles, an early Germanic nation that later migrated to Britain shortly after the Roman Empire stopped their occupation of Germany.

Linguistic oddities

English as a language contains many linguistic anomalies, most famously the lack of a phonetic writing system, due to the attempt to classify all the sounds in English using the Latin alphabet, which was notably developed for Latin, and not English. Further anomalies include hold-over spelling from old English and other, older formations, such as in the word "knight". The linguistic standardization through the printing press was especially crude in England, with various regional spelling which reflected local pronunciation being taken as standard spellings, despite the lack of phonetic accuracy. Further oddities were introduced by 17th century grammarians' attempts to create a standard English grammar, for instance the maintaining of the singular and plural "you" but the abandoning of the singular "they" (which is still used and was still used due to the lack of any other third person plural pronoun).

thorn, eth, ash, wynn and missing Z/z in old english

Interestingly, there used to exist four more letters in the English alphabet, namely thorn (Þ/þ), eth (Ð/ð), ash (Æ/æ) and wynn (Ƿ/ƿ). Furthermore in old English there was no Z sound and therefor no symbol to represent it. A "Z" sound would only come about in middle English.

thorn and eth

Thorn and eth both represented the same sound in old English, the "th" sound or /θ/. Both were used interchangeably and often by the same scribes.

ash

In old English the ash character represented a sound in-between "a" and "e", similar to the modern-day pronunciation of cat in some dialects of English. It developed out of the Latin usage of the ash as the stand-in for the diphthong "ae". when representing a long vowel, there is a macron (or less commonly an acute) placed on top of the ash.

wynn

In old English, Wynn represented a "w" sound, similar to today's "w", it developed as a stand-in for the previous writing of "uu" to denote the same sound. It fell out of use in the 1300s with the development of middle English.