Excursion 30: By the Letter, Part IV

In this excursion, Dr. Luke Gorton examines the history of letters representing sibilants and sonorants: L, M, N, R, S, X, and Z.

Bonus: I refer (as a speaker of American English) to the letter Z as "zee", while speakers of English throughout most of the world call it "zed". The name "zed" is actually more reflective of the letter's history, since the Romans called this letter "zeta" when they borrowed it from the Greeks. This name eroded into "zed" in French and was passed on as such into English. However, the pronunciation "zee" is actually the expected modern outcome via the sound laws of French and English, since the sound [t] between vowels in Latin typically disappeared entirely in early French!

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