• ‘N’ PROBABLY STARTED its life 4,000 years ago as an Egyptian hieroglyph with one very small ripple and one large one, meaning a ‘cobra’ or ‘snake’. The ancient Semites took this diagonal squiggle, smoothed it out a bit, and gave it the sound ‘n’ from ‘nun’ meaning ‘fish’. This may have been logical if, as a people, their word for water-based snakes and fish was the same. By the year 1000, the diagonal had become vertical and the sign contained just one wave. The ancient Greeks took it from the Phoenicians, calling it ‘nu’, and it now looked like a ‘v’ added to a long vertical tail on the right-hand side. The Etruscans copied it and passed it on to the Romans who shortened the tail so that it was now a ‘v’ attached to an inverted ‘v’ or ‘downstroke, upstroke, downstroke’. By the time Imperial Rome was carving it on its victory arches, it was the ‘N’ we know today.

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The lower-case ‘n’ appears in around AD 800 amongst the letters standardized by Charlemagne’s scribes with their ‘Carolingian minuscule’. This was adopted by the Italian printers in the 1500s as their lower-case ‘n’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER-NAME

Like the evolution of ‘em’ for ‘M’, ‘n’ derived from a late Roman, early medieval ‘ennay’.

PRONUNCIATION OF THE LETTER

‘N’ likes vowels sounds, so we surround it with ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’ and the vowel ‘y’. At the ends of syllables and words we can use sympathetic consonants to make ‘end’, ‘rent’, ‘rinse’, ‘lynx’, ‘sink’, ‘Winslow’ and ‘envy’. Preceding the ‘n’ with consonant sounds we can make ‘isn’t’, ‘kiln’, the name ‘Milne’ and the ‘ichneumon fly’. With the prefixes ‘in’, ‘an’, ‘un’, ‘con’ and ‘en’, ‘N’ becomes more cooperative, as with ‘enrol’, ‘condition’, ‘under’, ‘untoward’, ‘anxious’, ‘unbelievable’ and so on. The ‘-nik’ ending of ‘beatnik’ and ‘sputnik’, borrowed from Russian, introduced a new way to use ‘n’ though I knew of ‘nudniks’ (‘fools’ in Yiddish) when I was a child.

As with ‘m’, ‘n’ doubles or stays single on the same basis: ‘run, running’, ‘tune, tuning’.

Like the initial ‘M’ in names and words in some African languages, an initial ‘N’ appears in names like ‘Nkosi’ and ‘Ngaio’. The world’s most popular name is the Chinese name ‘Ng’ and English speakers are learning how to say it.

‘N’ on its own has had a new life in a pseudo-mathematical way where we talk of ‘the nth degree’ or even of ‘n number of cases’ as if it is an abbreviation for ‘any’. Another way that ‘n’ survives on its own is the now acceptable way of writing ‘rock’n’roll’, though ‘rock’n’roll’ has now solidified as ‘rock’.

Modern phonics teaching tells children that the ‘kn’ of ‘know’ and the ‘gn’ of ‘gnome’ are ‘ways of making the “n” sound’, rather than saying that the ‘k’ or the ‘g’ are ‘silent’, which certainly makes it less mysterious and sinister. I was once so interested in ‘knock’, ‘knack’ and ‘knuckle’ that I regularly wrote ‘neck’ as ‘kneck’.

Word-play with ‘n’ gives us ‘ninny’, a ‘no-no’, some people’s word for a ‘dummy’ – a ‘num-num’, ‘nanny’, ‘nan’ and ‘nana’. John Donne said, ‘No man is an island’ which gives you a ‘no’, an ‘-n is’, and an ‘-n island’. (Alliteration sometimes works by linking the ends of words to the beginnings of the next.) Feste sings, ‘Hey nonny nonny . . .’