Archived from the original on 7 April 2010. 'Old English / Anglo-Saxon (Englisc)'.Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1898 The Old English alphabet was recorded in the year 1011 by a monk named Byrhtfer and included the 24 letters of the Latin alphabet (including ampersand) and 5 additional English letters: Long S (), Eth ( and ), Thorn (), Wynn () and Ash ( later and ). Ward in the Inner-Temple-Lane, OCLC 642421515. Parker at the Bible and Crown in Lombard-Street, and T. (1st ed.), London: John Fortescue Aland printed by W Bowyer in White-Fryars, for E. Publish'd with some Remarks by John Fortescue-Aland, of the Inner-Temple, Esq F.R.S. Copy in the Bodleian Library, and Collated with Three Other MSS. Lord Chief Justice, and Lord High Chancellor of England, under King Henry VI. Being a Treatise Written by Sir John Fortescue, Kt. ^ John Fortescue (1714), The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy: As it More Particularly Regards the English Constitution.Macrons ⟨¯⟩ over vowels were rarely used to indicate long vowels, but it was also used occasionally as a nasal indicator (sort of like a tilde) if the vowel was succeeded by an s ( ms or ns would turn into ◌̄s). Also used was a symbol for the conjunction and, a character similar to the number seven ( ⟨⁊⟩, called a Tironian et or ond), and a symbol for the relative pronoun þæt, a thorn with a crossbar through the ascender ( ⟨ ꝥ⟩). The letter ðæt ⟨ð⟩ (called eth or edh in modern English) was an alteration of Latin ⟨d⟩, and the runic letters thorn ⟨þ⟩ and wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ are borrowings from futhorc. This was used until the end of the 12th century when continental Carolingian minuscule (also known as Caroline) replaced the insular, along with a shift in spelling conventions toward the Old French alphabet, leading to Middle English. This was replaced by Insular script, a cursive and pointed version of the half-uncial script. Old English was first written in runes ( futhorc) but shifted to a (minuscule) half-uncial script of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish Christian missionaries from around the 8th century.

The Middle English manuscripts Stowe MS 57 and Cotton Titus D 18 do not present the letters in the exact same order, but both place the non-standard Latin letters at the end of the alphabet.Ī table entitled 'The Saxon-Alphabet' on the last page of John Fortescue's The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy (1st ed., 1714) The first column ('Figure') of the table shows the letters of the Old English Latin alphabet, and the second column ('Power') their modern equivalents. The letters J, Q, V, W and Z were essentially left unused outside of foreign names, while the letter K was used by some writers but not by others. Of these letters, most were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters ( Æ, Ð), and two developed from the runic alphabet ( Ƿ, Þ). The Old English Latin alphabet generally consisted of about 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 8th to the 12th centuries.

I in old english