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2023-02-15 19:50 dustin  
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^ has already seen a lot of "o"s, but he had never considered the possibility that they might stare back at him!  
  
history of the letter "o":  
  
| the egyptian root was likely a hieroglyph for an eye with pupil, which was adopted into the proto-sinaitic script. see the shape of the (whole) cave!   
  
| the phoenicians, as usual, simplified and geometrized the glyph. they deleted the pupil and made the shape of the eye more round, so that their 15th letter "'eyn" (phoenician for "eye") looked pretty much like a circle, very similar to the modern form.   
but as we know, the phoenicians had no vowel letters, so which consonant did their letter represent? it was a kind of [h] sound (as in "house") but spoken with voice. i mentioned this sound already in the i/j comment, but here's again the wikipedia article on the sound. today, it's above all an arabic/ hebrew sound but it appears also in some european languages like dutch, danish and some german dialects (which i don't speak) :d  
  
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative" target="external">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative</a>  
  
| the ancient greeks adopted the letter without changing the form much. however, they did not use the "voiced [h]" sound in their language, so this was another good opportunity to turn a letter into a vowel. they called their letter simply "o" at first (later it became "omicron") and spoke it [o] (similar to english "of" but more closed; the exact [o] sound actually does not exist in english!)  
  
| no significant changes be the etruscians and romans (as usual, one might say by now!) :d  
  
remark: as mentioned above, the ancient greeks simply called their letter "o" at first. it could represent either a short or a long [o] sound. later, the greeks wanted to distinguish both sounds, so they invented another "o" letter, shaped similarly (like a horseshoe) and put it at the end of their alphabet. yes, this was the famous last letter "omega"! the old "o" letter was renamed into "omicron", today mainly known as a corona variant... :d  
note that:  
"omega" = "o mega" = "big o" (because it was spoken like a loooong [o])  
"omicron" = "o micron" = "small o" which represented the short [o] sound.  
meanwhile, the sounds of both letters are the same in greek, which makes the letters appear a bit redundant nowadays.  
  
for puzzle fans:  
inspired by  Helena , and the discussions are already running in the "n" comments:  
one of the remaining letters comes from another part of the face, namely a mouth. which one could that be? i already revealed that it is not the "q". it might not be so easy to guess because the letter in question has changed remarkably since it was a mouth, but i think it's still possible to recognize it ;)  
  
cave difficulty: 2/10

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2023-02-15 20:57 dustin  
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small mistake: the phoenician "'eyn" was actually not the 15th letter of their alphabet but the 16th, which means that they had another letter between their "n" and "o" equivalents! well, if you check the modern greek alphabet, this won't surprise you because the greeks still have this letter. it's called "xi", and as you may already guess from that name, it will be time for that one later in the series! :d