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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: WIL-YAK |
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WYVERN, or WIVERN , the name of an heraldic monster
dragon and the hind part of a serpent or lizard (see HERALDRY). The earlier spelling of the word was wiver or wivere; O. Eng. wyvre; O. Fr. wivee, mod. givre. It is a doublet of " viper," with an excrescent n, as in " bittern," M. Eng. bitore.X the twenty-fourth letter of the English alphabet. Its position and form are derived from the Latin alphabet, which received them from the Western Greek alphabet. The alphabet of the Western Greeks differed from the Ionic, which is the Greek alphabet now in general use, by the shape and position of X and of some other consonants. The Ionic alphabet placed x () immediately after N and, in the oldest records, in the form +, from which the ordinary Greek capital 17 was developed. The position and shape of this symbol show clearly that it was taken from the Semitic Samekh, which on the Moabite stone appears as . Why the Greeks attached this value to the symbol is not clear; in Semitic the symbol indicates the ordinary s. Still less clear is the origin of the form X, which in the Ionic alphabet stands for x (k followed by a breath). In a very ancient alphabet on a small vase found in 1882 at Formello near the ancient Veii
horizontal
vertical lines, X in its earliest form + by removing the four marginal lines. The Ionic symbol, however, corresponds closely to the earliest Phoenician, so that this theory is not very plausible for Z, and there are various other possibilities for the development of X (see ALPHABET). This symbol appears in the very early Latin inscriptions found in the Roman Forum in 1899 as )&. In its usual value as ks it is superfluous. In the Ionic alphabet it was useful, because there it represented a single sound, which before the invention of the symbol had to be represented by kit. In the alphabet in use officially at Athens before 403 B.C. X was written by Yv (kits). In English there is an interesting variation of pronunciation in many words according to the position of the accent
accent
The symbol X was used both by the Romans and the Etruscans for the numeral to. Which borrowed from the other is uncertain, but the Etruscans did not use X as part of their alphabet. X with a horizontal
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