This is a report that youngest son did on the beginnings of our country today.
"George Washington was the first president. Before that, he was a general in the revolutionary war. Before that, he was a spy and a delegate.
Napoleon was the emperor in France. The Indians were getting kicked out of their own land. People could still have slaves. The presidents were not completely in control. Oh yeah, and the letter J was not a letter."
We went on a field trip to Locust Grove this week (an old house) and the guide told the kids that the letter J was not in a sampler hanging on the wall because it didn't exist yet. I told him I don't think that's true, but he is determined that it is because the guide told him. I need to look that up.
3 comments:
Now I'm going to have to look it up!
I had to go searching too & here's what I found......
"But essentially the letters J and V were not part of the early (Latin) alphabet: the same letters were used for I/J and U/V until about the 19th century. You will quite often see, for example, Jesus spelled as IESVS. So presumably the missing I is a variant of this! Most early samplers had the abbreviated alphabet on them; more recently (say in the 19th century) some might have one short 24-letter alphabet and one long (26-letter) one."
Finding an original sampler with the "J" missing may indicate it was done on or prior to 1800. This is from American Needlework, by Georgiana Harbeson.
Thank you for looking that up. I've been trying to find it without any luck. The needlework was supposed to have been done in the late 1700s.
Cool.
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