Comment on Why would an all loving god create hell?
over_clox@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoAlso, that doesn’t quite answer how the other words I listed were actually spelled or pronounced prior to the year 1524.
It all seems a bit sus to me, as if someone in 1524 injected a letter into the alphabet just for the sake of altering the historical narrative and making it harder for future generations to learn the truth, however it was written.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You’re making a dumb conspiracy out of nothing.
I was curious after reading your posts, so I looked up the most famous person I know out of history from the period of ancient history with a name starring with “J”. Which is of course Julius.
And I found this, which goes a long way to explain a lot about the shape of letters and how they were used. This was answered on a stack-exchange for linguistic history:
“(linguistics.stackexchange.com/posts/…/timeline)
As others stated, on monumental inscriptions, the name of Julius Caesar would look similar to
However, saying it was “spelled with an I instead of a J” may be misleading, because ‘J’ as a later innovation did not arise from thin air: while ‘I’ and ‘J’ were not distinguished in Roman times, they existed as graphically distinct variants of the same letter, which always looked more like ‘I’ in capitals, but could sometimes look more like a (dotless) ‘ȷ’ in everyday cursive script.
The distinction was originally just a matter of natural variation within people’s handwriting, but in time, a habit tended to form where the first and/or last letters in a word may come to stand out more, resulting in ‘ȷ’ being used more often than ‘ı’ in those contexts, just like a better-defined ‘v’ would stand out more than a more fluidly-written ‘u’. I think this pattern can be observed in a few of the Vindolanda tablets for example. I consider it somewhat natural for the first bit of handwriting to be written more carefully or incisively than what follows.
In the case of ‘ȷ’ (often called the equivalent of “long I” in several modern languages), the distinction may also have been influenced by the standardized classical Roman habit of writing a longer ‘I’ to indicate that it was a long vowel, something they routinely did in inscription too, and which was unique to ‘I’ as the same indication was given for other vowel letters by writing an apex above them, at least when useful to reduce ambiguity. This use, in any case, is distinct from the specific shape and use that ‘J’ later evolved into.
Another letter that often underwent shape/length changes depending on position in Roman cursive was ‘s’, and this distinction also survived into modern times as the long ſ, this time used within words whereas ‘s’ would be used at the extremities. Since this also appears in Caesar’s name in both word positions, we can reconstruct the way his name would typically have been written in Roman cursive by approximating it, at least in concept, with the modern lowercase form
Perhaps because words that begin with ‘I’ or ‘V’ in Latin are statistically more likely to use those as the semivowels /j/ and /w/, rather that the vowels /i/ and /u/ which are more common in the middle of words, eventually — but well after Roman times, and partly after the Middle Ages — ‘J’ and ‘V’ established themselves as semivocalic forms, while ‘I’ and ‘U’ remained for the vowels, and since the informal cursive distinction in “glyph length” became systematized as swashes in printing, this was no longer just restricted to handwriting.”
over_clox@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This has got to be the absolute best response/answer to my question so far to date. 👍
I wish I could upvote this more than once actually.