The letter X

1. The letter X Extra Special Xby Katrina Lybbert Excellent, exciting letter XSo extra special is letter X. Fox, box, mix, wax, Phlox, ox, six, tax. Always an adventure to explore, With letter X, which we adore

2. X is the twenty-fourth letter in the modern Latin alphabet. It s name in English is spelled ex and the plural is exes. The consonant cluster /ks/ was in Ancient Greek written as either Chi X (Western Greek) or Xi (Eastern Greek). In the end Chi was standardized as x in Modern Greek while Xi was standardized as /ks/. But the Etruscans had taken over X from older Western Greek; therefore, it stood for /ks/ in Etruscan and Latin. (Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to the culture and way of life of a people of ancient Italy and Corsica whom the ancient Romans called Etrusci) It is unknown whether the letters Chi and Xi are Greek inventions or whether they are of Semitic origin. Chi was placed towards the end of the Greek alphabet after the Semitic letters however there is no similar letter in Semitic .

3. Is X really necessary? Fewer words in the English language startwith X than with any other letter. Its sounds are easily rendered by the ‘z’ or ‘ks’ combination. Locks/exit • The Phoenicians had no use for the ‘x’ sound, and many scholars contend that the Greeks did not use the letter to represent a phonetic sound. Even the Romans were not exactly sure where to use the letter, and stuck it at the end of their alphabet. • The Phoenician ancestor to our X was a letter called “samekh,” which meant fish. Although some historians argue that the character represented a post or support, with only a small stretch of the imagination the drawn character can be seen as the vertical skeleton of a fish.

4. When the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet they left some of the Phoenician sibilant letters behind, taking only those that represented sounds the Greeks required. The ancestor to our X, which represented a sharp ‘s’ sound, was one such letter. The Phoenician samekh became the Greek "xi," which had different sound values in the Eastern and Western Greek alphabets.

5. Inconsistencies in the Greek pronunciation and usage of some letterforms were a direct result of geographical and political disunity. There were many Greek dialects and variations in letterform shapes and sound values, but the two main alphabet subgroups were the Ionic and Chalcidian. By 400 B.C., the Ionic alphabet, which had been officially sanctioned at Athens, became what we now know as the classical Greek alphabet. The Chalcidian, which was the alphabet of some Greek colonies that migrated to southern Italy, influenced several Italian writing styles, including Umbrian, Oscan and Etruscan . The Romans appropriated the ‘x’ sound from the Chalcidian alphabet and represented it with the “chi” of the Ionic alphabet, which consisted of two diagonally crossed strokes. This letter became the prototype for both the capital and lowercase X we use today.

6. Interesting facts: • Initial x is found in Saxon words but begins no word in English • The prefix –ex in itself implies absence • X in math represents unknown quantity • X meaning 10 stood alone but was called decem • The sound ks appeared in Greek words in initial position but English and Latin require a vowel after the letter x • Greek-Naples-Italian coast-Etruscan-Latin • In all cases X represented the sound kswith a hard and noticeable K especially in proper nouns like Xerxes

7. Bibliography • http://www.independent.co.uk/this-britian/xrated-what-is-so-special-about-the-letter-x • http://www.letteroftheweek.com/letter • http://www.itcfonts.com