I recently read a great book about the development of the English
alphabet, The Alphabet by David Sacks which answers all of these
questions.
Off-hand I can't remember the answer as to why the letter names don't
follow the same pattern throughout i.e., why we have [bi:] but not
[hi:] - something to do with how the letters evolved from Phoenician
through Greek to Latin and beyond - but I do remember why we Brits have
'zed' and the Americans zee. Our zed comes from the French 'zede' and
entered English during the Middle English period due to the contact
with Norman French. It entered French from the Latin 'zeta' which can
still be found in modern Spanish and Italian. Mark is right though, and
the Romans did indeed get this from the Greek, where it is 'zeta'. The
Greeks in turn had borrowed it from the Phoenicians, for whom it was
'zayin', the name which is still used today in modern Hebrew. Before
'z' came to be known as 'zed' in English it had many other names;
'izzard, ezod, zad, zard' to name but a few. 'Zee' is a dialect form
which is thought to have been used in England up until the 17th
century. It's thought that it was brought to the USA by British
immigrants and it stuck.
bronwen
ps I've just noticed Jim's wikipedia link.... well this is for those of
you too lazy to click on the link I guess...... see also
http://www.billcasselman.com/cwod_archive/zed.htm for more info too.
On 1 Jun 2006, at 14:48, Mark Jones wrote:
> Sound reasoning from Karen Chung, but why then not [hi:] for <h>,
> [ri:] for /r/, [wi:] for <w> etc.? Is British usage due to Greek
> 'zita' maybe?
>
> Mark
>
> Mark J. Jones
> Department of Linguistics
> University of Cambridge
> http://kiri.ling.cam.ac.uk/mark/
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
Bronwen G. Evans,
Rm G4 Wolfson House,
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics,
University College London,
4, Stephenson Way,
London,
NW1 2HE.
Tel +44 (0)20 7679 5003
Fax +44 (0)20 7679 5107
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/bron
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