Jasper Quigley. 12 distinct letters across 13 marks. Below is the material itself, without the prose.
This is not “K means strength of character”. A letter says nothing about whoever carries it, and no text here will claim it does. The letter itself has a biography, and that biography is documented: J split off from I in the sixteenth century.
split off from I in the sixteenth century
the youngest letter of the alphabet. The Italian Gian Giorgio Trissino argued in 1524 that I was doing two jobs, and English took another century to agree. Shakespeare's first editions print I where we write J: Iulius, Iohn.
added to the Latin alphabet in the third century BC
one of the very few letters with a name attached to it. The tradition, from Plutarch, credits a Roman schoolmaster, Spurius Carvilius Ruga, with adding a stroke to C to separate [g] from [k]; the new letter took the slot Z had vacated. Scholars argue whether he invented it or standardised a split already under way — the date is traditional, not documented.
split off from V in the sixteenth century
for most of its life U and V were one letter with two shapes, chosen by position rather than sound: V at the start of a word, U inside it. The split into a vowel and a consonant is younger than printing.
Phoenician qoph, through Greek qoppa and Etruscan
Greek eventually dropped this letter and kept it only as a numeral — but Latin had already taken it, through Etruscan, while it was still in use. Latin gave it one job, the combination QU, and English keeps it: outside borrowed words like Qatar and burqa, a q here is followed by a u.
Phoenician shin — "tooth", through Greek sigma
shin was a row of teeth, drawn as W. Greek turned it on its side into Σ, and Latin rounded it into S. Same tooth, three postures.
Greek epsilon, before that Phoenician he
in Phoenician this was a consonant, a breathy [h], drawn as a man with raised arms. Greek already wrote [h] with another borrowed sign, so this one was surplus — and Greek needed vowel letters, which Phoenician did not have at all. The most common letter in English began as a spare consonant.
A · P · R · I · L · Y
They are all present in the full text — but as a line, not a section. Only a letter with something to tell gets a long passage; the rest keep the rhythm. A good guidebook works the same way: not every house on the street deserves a paragraph.
ONOMA · a reading of a name, not a prophecy