Letters of the alphabet - Wordsmith.org

In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) Robert Burton, suggesting various diversions for the melancholy, writes,

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By this art you may contemplate the variation of the twenty-three letters, which may be so infinitely varied, that the words complicated and deduced thence will not be contained within the compass of the firmament; ten words may be varied 40,320 several ways...

Emphasis added. The words in italics are also the epigraph to The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges.

But why 23? Burton was English. Is it possible he made a mistake?

In some old texts v is u and y is i, but that's just a stab in the dark. Burton uses 26 letters in his book.

Off hand, I'd suggest that i counted for j, u for v, and w was a digraph.

Burton uses 26 letters in his book.

You've been reading an original MS? Most older texts have been normalized by later editors.

I'm just going off the original frontispiece, where u, v, j, and i are all given as separate letters. But you're right, it might be a different story in the original text.

Reminds me of a certain PC operating system I dare not mention for fear of a lawsuit, reputed to have an estimated 100,000 snags. This beats Burton's estimate all hollow, for it is safe to guess and my experiences with it seem to bear ou9t the idea that the total number of possible interactions among all these glitches far exceeds the number of neutrons in the universe, factorial

Bu only the sheerest coincidence, as if to confirm my assertion, Spellcheck didn't flag "ou9t"

Nor "Bu"

God bless Bill Gates

For his charitable works not his code

where u, v, j, and i are all given as separate letters

It may be that the feeling at the time was that j was a different form of the letter i (and so too with v, w, and u). In the like manner as majuscule and minuscule or print and cursive. Just a WAG, though, on my part.

Why do old texts use an i for a j and a v for a u (and a y for an i sometimes)? Are j and u recent innovations? Was the pronunciation any different?

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It may be that the feeling at the time was that j was a different form of the letter i

Kind of like c and �?

Kind of like c and �?

The cedilla originated with a little z (or zed). Similar to the Polish diacritic called an ogonek or 'little hook'. (It's called a hook in English.) It indicates nasalization of the vowel it modifies. Kinda like the tilde in Portuguese (which originated as a small n). Anna: what's this diacritic called in Portuguese? Different orthographies for different languages have different sorting rules for letters. For example, ch used to be sorted between the c and d entries in Spanish dictionaries, but I've heard that Spain has changed this. But, yes, in French, c and � are considered the same in dictionaries.