 Welcome to the end-note 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 sum, monk, and cum by putting the 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 ua, 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 digama, 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 off with a w sound. Now, it's important to keep in mind that the Romans wrote that letter u in two ways. When inscribing on stone, it was formed with straight lines, like our modern letter v, but when it was written by pen or stylus, it was curved like our modern letter u. But both of these forms represented the same letter. The Romans didn't have a v sound, which is why Julius Caesar, sorry, Julius Kaiser actually said whenny-weedy-weaky. 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 teeth on your lower lip and blowing air through, what's called a labiodental 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 as wife and wives, wolf and wolves. Though now we indicate that difference in pronunciation with a different 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 o-v, 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 rose the convention of writing two u's in a row, a practice that later led to the letter w, now written with the pointed form of the letter, more like double v, which is what the letter is called in French, double v. But before these two u's were joined together into a new letter, the two u convention could lead to some cumbersome spellings, such as the Old English spelling of the word wolf, with three u's 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 win, 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 win and went back to the w digraph. They were thus faced with the same problem again, made even harder to read in the 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 i's. 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 munuk, and cum from Old English kuman. Not all u's were changed, of course, only when it caused difficulty in reading because of the letters around the u. So Old English full is still spelled with a letter u in Modern English full, and there are some inconsistencies, such as Old English sunu becoming Modern English sun with an o, but sunu becoming sun with a u. Now something even more complex happened with the word busy, and again, I'll have to go back to Phoenician, and in fact that same letter wa. Because the Greeks actually got two letters out of wa, the digama making the consonant w sound that we saw earlier, and the upsilon for their u sound, a rounded front vowel that's made as if you were making an e sound, but rounding your lips as if you were making an u sound. By the way, the letter was originally just called u in Greek, but this was later expanded to upsilon, meaning simple or naked u, to distinguish it from similar sanding 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 that it had in Athenian Greek at the time, which was where we got the letter y from. The Romans called it e greica, meaning the Greek I, and that's still what it's called in French, e 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 minimum problem we talked about before. So for instance, the word in William, meaning impassable, and made up entirely of minims, could instead be written with a y in place of an 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 busy was sometimes written with a y, and sometimes with an I representing different regional pronunciations. The e 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. As Old English became Middle English, we ended up with the u spelling, reflecting that rounded variant found in West Midland and Southern dialects, but the I pronunciation from the East Midland dialect. A thoroughly confusing business. I'll be continuing to respond to your comments and suggestions in more spelling b 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 not podcast available on all the major podcast platforms, as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching.