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From: stevemac@bud.indirect.com (Steve MacGregor)
Subject: Origin of the letters AE,Y,W,J
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Date: Fri, 2 Jun 1995 09:12:36 GMT
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According to jlawler@snoopy.ling.lsa.umich.edu (John Lawler):

>  It is noteworthy that no less than five of our 26 letters, namely F, U,
V, W, Y, all descend ultimately from the same letter, wa:w, in the Semitic
ancestor-alphabet." 

  It think there's a step missing here.

  Our letter F comes from the Greek letter WAH (originally situated 
between EPSILON and ZETA), which descended from the Semitic VAV.  After 
the Romans copied the alphabet from the Greeks, Greek dropped the letter 
as a letter, but still used it as the numeral 6.
  V, W, and Y are offshoots (as has been pointed out here recently) of U, 
which comes from Greek UPSILON.
  The missing step is showing that UPSILON came from Semitic VAV.  I 
always figured that the letters after TAU were made up by the Greeks, 
and that they are not variants of other letters.  (Though the similarity 
between OMICRON ("little-O") and OMEGA ("big-O") is a little obvious.)

                               --=<*>=--

Totally beside-the-point comment on Greek numerals:

  I've noticed that some manuscripts of the Greek New Testament have the 
number 666 spelled out in The Revelation, but a few use Greek numerals:  
CHI-Xi-WAH.  Apparently, WAH has a few other names, such as DIGAMMA (from 
its shape).  "Strong's Exhaustive Concordance" catalogs the numeral under 
the spelled-out name "chi xi stigma".   Yes:  stigma.

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