Possible 27th Letter

[What's this?  Two posts in one day?!  Make sure you scroll down and read both!]

Have you heard about the Aussie that wants to introduce a 27th letter to the English alphabet?  A restauranteur named Paul Mathis has come up with something that will save us all valuable time: Ћ.  That symbol represents the word "the" and will save everyone time because "the" is the most frequently used word in English.  It also won't be adopted.

You see, the problem is that it isn't a letter, it's a word.  Because English uses the Roman alphabet (with the addition of J and W), not everything fits perfectly, but the idea is that each letter represents a sound or phoneme that we produce when we speak.  For example, the word "arm" has three distinct sounds that are represented by the letters.  We fake it for some phonemes by combining letters (the "oo" in "foot" is one phoneme represented by two letters), but the basic idea is well established.  Ћ is a symbol for a word, not a symbol for a sound.

However, it's not the first time a symbol for a word has been seen as a letter.  That's right folks, I'm talking about the ampersand.  For many generations, school children would finish reciting their alphabet by adding "and, per se, and" to the end (& was originally called "per se, and;" ampersand is simply a corrupted form of the original name).  And while the ampersand is still used regularly today and is even standard on computer keyboards, it is no longer considered a letter, but rather a form of punctuation.  Now if Mister Mathis wants us to consider Ћ as a new punctuation mark, I'm certainly willing to consider it.  Having an abbreviated way to write "the" as an option could certainly be attractive, especially with social media sites that often limit the number of characters allowed in a post.

But at the end of the day, I just can't see the new symbol being adopted as a letter.  At least not in America.