WYTTENBACH, Johanna Galion, Dutch writer: d. Leyden (18-V). She was married to D. Wyttenbach (9.v.) when he was 72, and after her husband s death lived at Paris and was given the degree of doctor in philolopb) by Marburg, in le27. Among her writings sera th ea gen rA ' (1815); 'Leontes' Banones (1812); and the romance 'Alexis' (1W).
twenty-fourth letter and nine teenth consonant of the English al phabet: it is a superfluous letter since it stands for no sound that cannot be signified by other letters. When it occurs in the beginning of a word it is always pronounced in English as s: Xenophon, sena thou, siphoid, siphoid; in the middle of a word it is usually equal to ks: axis, aksis, Saxon, sak- • son; but when in a word it ends a syllable, more especially an initial syllable, if the syllable fol lowing it is open or accented, the x has often the value of pa. as in luxury, lug wry, exhaust, epziosst. Final x is always equal to ks. As an :racial letter x does not occur in English save in words mostly technical and derived from Greek, and in a few words, mostly proper names, of Spanish origin.— The power of x in English. as in Latin, is that of the Greek letter xi (E f ). It has been suggested that its form is that appropriated in the Greek alphabet to the guttural aspirate chi (X, x). Before the intro duction of .r (f) the Greeks represented the sound of x by XX, xs and the Latins at first did the like, writing Maxsamas, proxsumus; but as x had in their writing no function but that of representing, with s the sound of Greek xi, the very sight of the x, even before the eye came to the s, may have raised in the mind the idea of a sibilant, and thus rendered the sibilant k tier itself superfluous, so that before long it was omitted and x, standing alone, represented the two characters . and s. However, the evi
dence in favor of this view is not conclusive, and there are alternative opinions. In the pop ular pronunciation of Latin in the later period of the empire, x seems to have been sounded like s or Ss: some inscriptions of that period have visit for visit, and miles for miles: this change in the sound-value of x has persisted in the modern language of Italy in which ss or s is regularly substituted for the Latin .r: :axiom becomes J4S.10, experinseatia, esperimento, sruerisairs, massono and so on. In French, in words derived from Latin, the x occurring in the middle of a word is often changed to ss: laxare becomes looser; or Latin x is changed to the sound of sh: resort becomes facher; and the word soixante is pronounced soissante X scarcely occurs in German words of native ori gin; its sound is usually represented in that Language by ass, examples: ("chi (ox), wadis (wax), Sachre (a Saxon). X stands for 10 in the Roman symbolism,- x is often used in mathematics for an unknown quantity or the abscissa of a point. See ALPHABF.T.