They only reliably distinguished them for contracted vowels, where a contracted au is written with a plene U or U₄ (UD) sign, while a contracted iu or uu is written with a plene Ú sign. This makes phonological sense, since it parallels ai > ê, ii or ui > î, but there was also a phonemic short e, and it’s not clear if there was also a phonemic short o.
The much later Graeco-Babylonica suggests not—the Greek transcriptions reliably distinguish long ō from ū, but the short vowel is always transcribed o—but the time difference means that’s not great evidence. In these particular Nippur texts, when short u is written with its own sign (at the start of words or in a few irregular plene spellings), it’s spelled U/U₄ when adjacent to r or ḫ and Ú elsewhere, which suggests allophonic variation; but these circumstances are very specific so they only appear in a couple words.
As for a phonemic ō (as opposed to ô), there’s indirect evidence. The normal meaning of the sign UD (U₄) is “day”, ūmum, from Proto-Semitic *yawmum (compare Arabic yawm, Hebrew yōm), so they might have used the UD sign for o because this word was actually pronounced ōmum. The Graeco-Babylonica shows an ō there as well. But this is pretty speculative.
Notably, when Hittite needed to distinguish o from u, they also used the signs U and Ú (though not U₄), which suggests that the difference might go back to Sumerian. Or maybe not—in general, Ú was the unmarked sign for u and U was the marked one, so it makes sense to use the marked one for the less common pronunciation.
Yeah! English has a surprisingly long history of using plural pronouns for singular subjects: the royal “we”, the formal “you”, the generic “they”. That’s why “you” acts more like a plural than a singular pronoun: “I am”, “thou art”, “she is” versus “we are”, “you are”, “they are”.
That’s also why I prefer “themself” over “themselves” when referring to a single person: because we say “yourself” instead of “yourselves” in the same context.
It also gives us this fun rant by the early Quaker, Thomas Elwood, around 1700:
Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural number to a single person, you to one, instead of thou, contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, thou to one, and you to more than one, which had always been used by God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking you to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of men;—this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this I was now called out of, and required to cease from.
Which I like to pull out when someone says singular “they” is debasing the language. The generic singular “they” (referring to an unknown or unspecified person) is actually older than the singular “you”!
(The specific singular “they”, referring to a known person of unknown or unspecified gender, is quite new by comparison.)
I wonder, was you originally you? I under stand the y in Ye originally wasn’t a y at all, but an obsolete letter that made the Th sound, hence Ye becoming The in modern English Makes me wonder if You was originally written with that obsolete letter and shifted to the y-sound as You took over from thee and thou… Also, on the note of Y, I remember Y’s German name sticking out like a sore thumb and sounding almost Greek(I think it rhymes with epsilon) plus the whol J/Y muddling in places… makes me wonder what Y’s story is…
It is actually connected—the “ye” in “ye olde shoppe” was originally “þe” (that’s the obsolete letter), an old spelling of “the”. When the letter þ fell out of use, people misinterpreted it as a Y…but part of why they misinterpreted it in that particular way is because “ye” was also an existing word in its own right! It used to be that “ye” and “you” were like “I” and “me”; “ye” was the subject of a verb, “you” was the object.
Eventually we lost “ye” the same way we lost “thou” and so on. But we still see it in other Germanic languages, like Dutch je (subject) and jou (object).
Y is descended from a Phoenician letter called “waw”, which literally means “hook”. In Phoenician, they only had letters for consonants, not vowels; waw was the letter for a “w” sound.
When the Phoenician writing system was adapted for Greek, they repurposed some of those consonants into vowels. Waw was split into two letters: one that looks like F, for a “w” sound, and one that looks like Y, for a “u” sound (/u/ as in “tube”).
When the Greek writing system was then adapted for Etruscan, they needed a way to represent a “f” sound, which Greek didn’t have. Sometimes they wrote this as FH, sometimes with a new letter that looked like a number 8, sometimes with a simple F. So when the Etruscan alphabet was adapted for Latin, they used the letter F for a “f” sound. The letter Y, meanwhile, had been simplified into a V shape, and it was used for both the “u” sound and the “w” sound, since those are very similar to each other.
Over in Greek, meanwhile, they lost their “w” sound and discarded its letter. Their “u” sound had shifted to be a front vowel /y/, like in French tu or German über. (French people write this sound as “u” because the same thing happened in French as in Greek, just a millennium later.)
At the height of the Roman Empire, it was very prestigious to speak Greek. Latin was the language of the common folk; Greek was the language of the educated elite. And Greek had this /y/ sound that Latin didn’t. When Greek words were borrowed into Latin, you could show off your expensive education by spelling them with the Greek “Y” with the stem on the bottom, and pronouncing them with the fancy front rounded vowel /y/. Same for “Z”, another letter Greek had but Latin didn’t, and that’s why those two were shoved in at the very end of the alphabet.
To the common people, though, this Y was just a fancy Greek version of I, so they called it “Greek I”: i graeca. That’s why French and other languages still call the letter Y igrec. Most people pronounced Y and I exactly the same, so those letters frequently got mixed up and confused.
Back in Greece, pronunciation kept shifting, and soon Y and OI were pronounced the same, and E and AI were pronounced the same. The single letters were given new names to distinguish them: y psilon “plain Y” and e psilon “plain E”. This is why some other languages call Y ypsilon or upsilon.
In the West, the “w” sound in Latin started being pronounced as “v” instead. When they needed to write the old “w” sound, they wrote the letter twice: V for “v”, VV (W) for “w”. And since “v” and “u” aren’t as similar as “w” and “u” are, they eventually started writing the consonant as V and the vowel as U, to keep them distinct.
They split I into J and I for the same reason. I was originally used for both the consonant in “yell” and the second vowel in “machine”, which are very similar; when the consonant version shifted to be more like a modern English J, that wasn’t very much like an “i” at all, so it deserved a more distinct letter. But then there was no letter available for the consonant in “yell”…except there was also this redundant letter Y lying around. Why not repurpose it and make it more useful?
And thus we end up with our modern array of letters, F U V W Y, all from the same Phoenician source!
Yep! The Phoenician word for “ox” was ʔalp, so they used the ox-head image to write the consonant ʔ (the throat-catch in the middle of “uh-oh” or a Cockney pronunciation of “bottle”). Greek didn’t have that sound, so they transcribed its name as alpha, and repurposed it for the first vowel in that word. And thus we got A!
This means it’s related to Hebrew aleph, Arabic ʔalif, and so on. (Modern Hebrew has also lost the ʔ consonant in many dialects, so a lot of Hebrew-speakers now call it simply aleph instead of ʔaleph.)
And since the first two letters of the Phoenician writing system were ʔalp “ox” and bayt “house”, the first two letters of the Greek writing system became alpha and beta, and thus the whole system is an “alphabet”.
I feel obliged to direct the assembled company’s attention to the third finalist from the 2025 Little Lytton contest (Ctrl-F the page for “Salve!”): https://adamcadre.ac/lyttle/2025.html
And now I’m wondering if anyone has composed a nice sounding pangram including the words Ox and house.
Also, I find it funny the Romans considered Latin a language for the uneducated masses with how Latin would go on to be the language of the learned for much of the medieval and early modern eras and remains one of the biggest sources of scientific terminology to this day even if Latin’s popularity has fallen from you’re not a real scholar if you don’t have a functional understanding of Latin to you only need to know the latin-derived terms relevant to your field and even then, you don’t need to know which terms are Latin versus Greek versus sourced from another language.
Oh, speaking of pangrams, I just realised that althought I mentioned Ella Minnow Pea in the “what books are you reading” thread Ella Minnow Pea is also a book that would probably be entertaining for linguists, and others, as Ella Minnow Pea is not only an interesting gimmick but Ella Minnow Pea is also a reflection on a number of themes which, unfortunately, never go out of relevance.
“Gee, what an obvious sales pitch.”
“Sorry, on some topics I just get carried away.”
Anyway, it’s a 25 year old book, so most of you probably already know about it. But it’s always new to someone! I read it last year!
I’ve always wondered why English has no different word for you (singular) and you (plural). Now I see the Scottish have a difference
BTW in German we have that difference. But because “simple” would be boring we have two different “You”: one for friends and one for strangers (which is the equivalent of “they”). That sucks imo.
Sounds kinda similar to Portuguese. We have two “you”s, a formal (você - often implied, unstated but implied by the tense of the verb used) and an informal (tu). Funnily enough, these are swapped in brazilian PT when compared to european PT.
And we have a very formal and distant “you” which is like referring to ”you” as though you were a third party: “o/a senhor/a”, i.e., using the same verbs as though we were referring to the third person singular. Exactly like “você” I mentioned earlier. This is, in effect, sir/ma’am. And yes, some people do get offended if we address them like this, despite it literally being what we learned was the polite way to address someone we don’t know. Apparently it makes them feel old.
Funny, I never had to explain this to anyone before, and it never struck me until now how convoluted it all is.
I seem to remember that Italian also has “Lei” to mean a very formal “you”, when normally “lei” (capitalization matters) would mean the third person “her”.
…I don’t have a point, I’m just happily rambling.
EDIT - Oh, we have another one, but we really don’t use it anymore. But we have it. Archaic. The 2nd person of the plural, “vós”. It’s plural, but could be used to mean a hyper-formal "singular” “you” when speaking to people of markedly higher status than yourself (think “Your Highness” = “Vossa Alteza”. “Vossa” = “vós”. And yes, come to think it it, both are instances of the genitive). Really not used these days. Not even in very formal settings. Just sounds old and archaic. And I seem to read that it has contracted along with another word, “mercê”, so that the very formal “vossa mercê” (your Mercifulness, kinda; a way to address someone of higher statute) contracted into “você”.
This is called T/V distinction and a lot of Indo-European languages have or had it. (Of course, many other languages have also arrived at pronouns with formality distinctions by convergent evolution, but they might have more than two and are certainly less likely to have the informal one start with T or D and the formal with U or V.)
Alas, the knowledge that we are not special snowflakes is something all of us speaking languages descended from Proto-Indo-European have to accept. We have so many linguistic relatives!
The Basque speakers, OTOH, can feel smug and secure in their special snowflake status.
we have two different “You”: one for friends and one for strangers (which is the equivalent of “they”). That sucks imo.
