Welcome to the Endnotes Spelling Bee! In this miniseries I’m following up on the question
I asked in my video about Spelling: what are your spelling pet peeves? Viewer Saxo Ungrammaticus
(great username!) called for reforming the spellings of some, monk, and come by putting
u back in them, which used to be there in Old English and in any case more accurately
reflects the pronunciation of those words, and also putting the i back in busy.
To explain what happened here, I’m going to have to take us back to Phoenician and
look at a number of letters because there’s a bit of a domino effect going on. Let’s
start with the letter f — I know it seems unrelated, but trust me, we’ll get there!
f traces its ancestry back to the Phoenician alphabet and a character called waw meaning
“peg”, but it had a different sound then, more akin to Modern English’s /w/ sound.
This letter was initially borrowed into Greek, where it came to be called digamma, because
the symbol looked like two Greek gamma letters laid on top of each other. Greek eventually
dropped that letter as the sound disappeared from the language, but not before it was passed
on to the Etruscans, who also had that /w/ sound. But when it came to Latin, the Romans
needed a way to represent their /f/ sound, so the letter f was reassigned. As for the
/w/ sound, well the letter u did double duty representing both the vowel /u/ sound and
the consonant /w/ sound, since both were very similarly made with the lips rounded. In fact
you may find it difficult to make the /u/ sound without ending it off with a /w/ sound.
Now it’s important to keep in mind that the Romans wrote that letter u in two way.
When inscribing on stone it was formed with straight lines like our modern letter v, but
when written by pen or stylus it was curved like our modern u. But both of these forms
represented the same letter; the Romans didn’t have a /v/ sound (which is why Julius Caesar—sorry,
Yulius Kaiser—actually said “weni, widi, wici”!) When the letters f and u came into
Old English, a few modifications happened. First of all f had to represent two sounds,
both the /f/ sound and the /v/ sound. These two sounds are another pair of voiced and
unvoiced sounds that are otherwise articulated in the exact same way, placing your upper
teeth on your lower lip and blowing air through, what’s called a labio-dental fricative.
This was generally not a problem in Old English since the phonetic environment determined
which sound to make, for instance between two voiced sounds the /f/ became a /v/ and
we still see this today in such pairs wife and wives, wolf and wolves, though now we
indicate that difference in pronunciation with a difference in spelling. But we still
see traces of the letter f making a /v/ sound in Modern English. If you’ve ever wondered
why the word of isn’t spelled ov, well that’s the reason, it’s a holdover from the Old
English spelling convention. As for the letter u, initially it was also used in English to
make both the vowel and consonant sound as in Latin, and in post-Classical Latin there
eventually arose the convention of writing two uu in a row, a practise that later led
to the letter w now written with the pointed form of the letter, more like double vv, which
is what the letter is called in French, double V. But before those two uu were joined together
into a new letter, the two uu convention could lead to some cumbersome spellings, such as
the Old English spelling of the word uuulf with three uuu in a row. So the Anglo-Saxon
scribes soon developed a new solution to the problem, adding in one of those Germanic runic
characters, called wynn, to make the /w/ sound, so u only had to represent the vowel. In a
later spelling shift that doesn’t indicate a change in pronunciation, but just a scribal
convenience, since the Norman scribes didn’t like using those runic characters, they dumped
the wynn and went back to the uu digraph. They were thus faced with the same problem
again, made even harder to read in scripts used at the time in which the letter u was
made with two minims, that is two short vertical strokes that were identical to two letter
is. Indeed many letters were made with minims, such as n and m, making for *very* confusing
manuscripts! So to avoid the problem, Norman scribes would often change the letter u in
English words to the letter o, which is why wolf is now spelled with the letter o. Same
goes for some from Old English sum, monk from Old English munuc, and come from Old English
cuman. Not all us were changed of course, only when it caused difficulty in reading
because of the letters around the u, so Old English ful is still spelled with a u in Modern
English full, and there are some inconsistencies, such as Old English sunu becoming Modern English
son with an o, but sunnu becoming sun with a u.
Now something even more complex happened with the word busy, and again we’ll have to go
back to Phoenician, and in fact that same letter waw. Because the Greeks actually got
two letters out of waw, the digamma making the consonant /w/ sound that we saw earlier,
and the upsilon for their /y/ sound, a rounded front vowel that’s made as if you were making
an /i/ sound but rounding your lips as if you were making an /u/ sound. By the way,
the letter was originally called just υin Greek, but this was later expanded to upsilon
meaning “simple or naked υ to distinguish it from similar sounding digraphs. This letter
later passed into Etruscan and from there into the Roman alphabet, by which point the
character looked variously like a u or v as we’ve already seen. The sound it represented
was also slightly different. Latin didn’t have that rounded front vowel, so the letter
referred to their /u/ sound. But as the Romans began to borrow Greek vocabulary they found
they needed a letter to represent that Greek upsilon sound, so they simply re-borrowed
the letter in the form it had in Athenian Greek at the time, which was where we got
the letter y from. The Romans called it i graeca meaning the “Greek i”, and that’s
still what it’s called in French, i grec, and it was initially only used for words borrowed
from Greek. But eventually the pronunciation of the letter came to be indistinguishable
from the letter i and in Medieval Latin it was sometimes used interchangeably with the
letter i, especially to deal with that same minim problem we talked about before, so for
instance the word inuium meaning “impassable” and made up entirely of minims, could instead
be written with y in place of i. When the alphabet was adapted for Old English, they
found the letter y useful because like Greek Old English had that rounded front vowel.
And here’s where we finally get to the word busy, because Old English bysig was sometimes
written with a y and sometimes with an i, representing different regional pronunciations.
The /i/ sound was probably the original stem vowel sound, but in the late West Saxon dialect
this seems to have become rounded to the /y/ sound. And as Old English became Middle English
we ended up with the u spelling reflecting that rounded variant (found in the West Midland
and Southern dialects) but the i pronunciation from the East Midlands dialect. A thoroughly
confusing business! I’ll be continuing to respond to your comments
and suggestions in more Spelling Bee videos intermittently for the next while, in between
other main videos. Thanks for all the responses, which keep coming in! As always, you can hear
even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating
people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well
as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!