The British and others pronounce “
It did, after all, come first. Much of our modern alphabet comes directly from the Greek alphabet, including a letter, that looked just like our “Z,” that the Greeks called “zeta.” “Zeta” evolved into the French “zede,” which in turn gave us “zed” as English was shaped by Romance languages like French.
English speakers in other Commonwealth countries also prefer the pronunciation zed. As zed is the British pronunciation and zee is chiefly American, zed represents one of the rare occasions in which most Canadians prefer the British to the American pronunciation.
As it turns out, both of these pronunciations are correct, and which you use depends on where in the world you live. And zed is closer to other languages' spelling and pronunciation of the letter; for instance, the French say zède, German speakers say zet, and Spanish speakers say zeta.
So, you'd hear “Gen Zed” from anyone in Australia or the UK, probably New Zealand too, as they live in En Zed.
In most English-speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom, the letter's name is zed /zɛd/, reflecting its derivation from the Greek zeta (this dates to Latin, which borrowed Y and Z from Greek), but in American English its name is zee /ziː/, ...
Originally Answered: Why do the British say "zed" instead of "zee"? Because the letter 'Z' comes from the ancient Greek alphabet and its name in that alphabet is Zeta. This became Zede in old French, and, as many French words passed into the English language, became Zed in English.
According to military customs, a lower ranking soldier walks on the left side of a senior officer. This courtesy developed when swords were still used on the battle field. The lower ranked soldier on the "left" protected the senior officers left side. Therefore, the term leftenant developed.
J in German is pronounced as “yott” (rhyming with “thought”). The German J is pronounced as an English Y. This can be observed in words like ja, Jammer, and Jahr. Q in German shares a similarity with English: it is always paired with a U.
It has to do with the articulation of the consonant. Germans pronounce the “V” sound (written W in German) without fully connecting the lower lip with the teeth, and that gives it a sound halfway between V and W in English.
The short answer is that the two nations do speak different dialects of English. Additionally, neither the use of language nor the use of these different dialects is bound by distinct geographical borders. This is why 'mum' and 'mom' show up in other parts of the world outside of USA and the UK.
The UK version is more logical. Math is an abbreviation of mathematics, which is a count noun in British English because there are different types of maths (geometry, algebra, calculus, etc.) and a mass noun that happens to end in an 's' in American English (like gymnastics in both dialects).
In England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, India, Canada (usually), and New Zealand, Z is pronounced as zed. It's derived from the Greek letter zeta.
Most of the English-speakers in the world, including most Canadians, CALL the letter Z “zed”. Americans CALL it “zee”. It is usually PRONOUNCED /z/ (IPA).
According to the orthography in use in German prior to the German orthography reform of 1996, ⟨ß⟩ was written to represent [s]: word internally following a long vowel or diphthong: Straße, reißen; and. at the end of a syllable or before a consonant, so long as [s] is the end of the word stem: muß, faßt, wäßrig.
The German language normally uses ⟨f⟩ to indicate the sound /f/ (as used in the English word fight) and ⟨w⟩ to indicate the sound /v/ (as in victory). However, ⟨v⟩ does occur in a large number of German words, where its pronunciation is /f/ in some words but /v/ in others.
“Colonel” came to English from the mid-16th-century French word coronelle, meaning commander of a regiment, or column, of soldiers. By the mid-17th century, the spelling and French pronunciation had changed to colonnel. The English spelling also changed, and the pronunciation was shortened to two syllables.
It's just an old English way of speaking. Many people say "us" but if they are writing will use the word "me". I was born in Sunderland and I use it some times, depends who I am talking to. "us" meaning you and me sounds like "uss".
British people call people love or 'luv' as it is sometimes spelled in its short form in exactly the same way as Americans would call someone honey or 'hon' for short. It is just an informal form of language used in certain walks of life and is something people have just grown up with.
Zee, on the other hand, first appeared in print in a British language textbook—Thomas Lye's New Spelling-book—in 1677. The name zee itself is thought to have originated as nothing more than a dialect variation of zed, probably influenced by the regular bee, cee, dee, ee pattern of much of the rest of the alphabet.