Re: The Roman alphabet and its original letter names.

Steven Williams wrote:
>
> So, how _did_ the ancient Romans sing the 'ABC Song'?
Vowels were named by their sound, nasals, fricatives, and liquids were
/e/ plus the consonant, stops were consonant plus /e/, except that Q and
K were /ku/ and /ka/ respectively; y and z were Greek borrowings and
were, I think, called "I graeca" and "zeta" respectively.  I think X was
/eks/, so:

A   /a/
B   /be/
C   /ke/
D   /de/
E   /e/
F   /ef/
G   /ge/
H   /he/
I/J /i/
K   /ka/
L   /el/
M   /em/
N   /en/
O   /o/
P   /pe/
Q   /ku/
R   /er/
S   /es/
T   /te/
U/V /u/
X   /eks/
Y   /y/ or "i graeca"
Z   /zeta/

The modern English name for "h" comes from the French "ache" or
something like that, which in turn came from midieval Latin "acca", a
name derived from an attempt at [aha] by people who lacked /h/; the loss
of /h/ had merged the names of "e" and "h".  The modern name for "R"
comes from an er -> ar sound change (which also survives in the word
"parson").  The name for "Y" comes from /y/.  When OE merged /y/ and
/i/, the name of "y" would've become homophonous with "i", and so,
presumably in an attempt to approximate /y/, they began to say /wi/.
THe names of "J", "V" and "Z" are by analogy.

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