Now we come to Q and R, the letters which were mentioned above as those probably coming from the head. Whether Q (koph) was derived from the picture of the back view of the head and neck, or whether it represents a knot, which, no doubt, was as important to navigators then as it is now, is a mooted question. The Q sound is guttural and the tail of the letter is supposed to indicate the throat sound. The Greeks soon discarded “koppa,” as it was called, and the Romans went back to the original source for their Q (koo). The back view of the head is the unusual one, for as we look at the drawing of the early races, or memory pictures, or the delineations of a child of seven or eight we find they are almost without exception profile pictures. The Phoenician “resh” represents the profile and shows very little resemblance to a human being, although at first the features may have been more clearly indicated. The Greeks, as was to be expected, turned the letter around, and later, oddly enough, introduced a curve making it exactly like the Roman letter P. The extra stroke which we find in the Roman letter was no doubt due to the carelessness in copying. They pronounced it R (air). S There is a common legend explaining S, the letter with the hissing sound. Because of its curved shape and its hissing sound many people believe it to be derived from a snake. Its real history is easily followed from Phoenician “shin” or “sin” (teeth) to the present day. Its form closely resembled our W. The Greeks made it perpendicular for their “sigma” and the Romans simplified and curved it giving S (ess). T Our twentieth letter, T, is particularly interesting because it is derived from “tahv” a mark or cross made by people who could not write, and no doubt their signature frequently resembled it. We must not forget that even Charlemagne and other kings of the middle ages had to make their mark or trace their initials through stencil plates. The only change of “tahv” to Greek “tau,” and to Roman T (tay) was the raising of the cross bar. U-V-Y The letters U, V and Y were all taken from the letter “Upsilon,” and it may have been derived from the queer Hebrew form of “Ayin” which closely resembles Y. The letters U and V were interchangeable. Upsilon, known as the “Samian letter,” was used by Pythagoras as an emblem to represent the parting of the ways—the young man making a choice in life. W Our Anglo-Saxon forefathers contributed two letters, W (wen) and another often confused with Y, called “thorn.” These were introduced during the thirteenth century. The French always called the former letter double vay, and in English it may be said to represent double U, as its name indicates. The letter “thorn” had the value of the digraph “th,” and “ye” in old English should be pronounced “the” like the definite article. X-Z