Thorn (letter)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with
Latin letter P, or ϸ, the Graeco-Bactrian letter Sho
.
Þ
Þ þ
Θ, th
Other
Other letters commonly used withth, dh
Writing directionLeft-to-right
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the

Elder Fuþark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. The only language in which þ is currently in use is Icelandic.[1]

It is pronounced as either a

voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative [ð̠],[2][3] similar to th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth ⟨Ð, ð⟩; however, [ð̠] may occur as an allophone of /θ̠/, and written ⟨þ⟩, when it appears in an unstressed pronoun or adverb after a voiced sound.[4]

In typography, the lowercase thorn character is unusual in that it has both an ascender and a descender (other examples are the lowercase Cyrillic ф, and, in some [especially italic] fonts, the Latin letters f and ſ [long s]).

Uses

English

Old English

The letter thorn was used for writing

ð, called eth. Unlike eth, thorn remained in common use through most of the Middle English period. Both letters were used for the phoneme /θ/, sometimes by the same scribe. This sound was regularly realised in Old English as the voiced fricative [ð] between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it; the modern use of [ð] in phonetic alphabets is not the same as the Old English orthographic use. A thorn with the ascender crossed (Ꝥ) was a popular abbreviation for the word that
.

Middle and Early Modern English

"... hir the grace that god put ..." (Extract from the The Boke of Margery Kempe)

The modern digraph

King James Version of the Bible in 1611 used ye for "the" in places such as Job 1:9, John 15:1, and Romans 15:29.[7]
It also used yt as an abbreviation for "that", in places such as 2 Corinthians 13:7. All were replaced in later printings by the or that, respectively.

Abbreviations
Abbreviations of "the"
Middle English þ with superscript e
Blackletter y with superscript e

The following were scribal abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:

  • thorn with superscript e (þͤ) – a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
  • thorn with superscript t (þͭ) – a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
  • thorn with superscript u (þͧ) – a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou (which was written early on as þu or þou)

In later printed texts, given the lack of a sort for the glyph,[5] printers substituted the (visually similar) letter y for the thorn:

  •    yᷤ – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this
  • y with superscript e (yͤ) – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
  • y with superscript t (yͭ) – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that

Modern English

Thorn in the form of a "Y" survives in pseudo-archaic uses, particularly the

definite article spelt with "Y" for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced /jiː/ ("yee") or mistaken for the archaic nominative case of the second person plural pronoun, "ye
", as in "hear ye!".

Khmer

Þþ is sometimes used in Khmer romanization to represent ធ thô.

Icelandic

anglicised
as Hafthor.

Its pronunciation has not varied much, but before the introduction of the

runic alphabet and is described in the First Grammatical Treatise
from the 12th-century:

Staf þann er flestir menn kalla þ, þann kalla ég af því heldur þe að þá er það atkvæði hans í hverju máli sem eftir lifir nafnsins er úr er tekinn raddarstafur úr nafni hans, sem alla hefi ég samhljóðendur samda í það mark nú sem ég reit snemma í þeirra umræðu. [...] Höfuðstaf þe-sins rita ég hvergi nema í vers upphafi því að hans atkvæði má eigi æxla þótt hann standi eftir raddarstaf í samstöfun.[10]

– First Grammarian, First Grammatical Treatise

The letter which most men call thorn I shall call the, so that its sound value in each context will be what is left of the name when the vowel is removed, since I have now arranged all the consonants in that manner, as I wrote earlier in this discussion. [...] The capital letter of the I do not write except at the beginning of a section, since its sound cannot be extended, even when it follows the vowel of the syllable.[11]

– First Grammarian, First Grammatical Treatise, translation by Einar Haugen

Upper- and lowercase versions of the thorn character, in sans-serif (left) and serif (right)

Computing codes

See also:
Alt codes

Upper and lower case forms of thorn have Unicode encodings:

  • U+00DE Þ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN (Þ)
  • U+00FE þ LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN (þ)

These Unicode

codepoints were inherited from ISO/IEC 8859-1
("ISO Latin-1") encoding.

Variants

See also: Medieval Unicode Font Initiative

Various forms of thorn were used for medieval scribal abbreviations:[12]

See also

  • Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩
  • Sho (letter), Ϸ, a similar letter in the Greek alphabet used to write the Bactrian language
  • Yogh, Ȝ, a letter used in Middle English and Older Scots
  • Wynn, Ƿ, another runic letter used in Old English
  • Eth, Ð, another Old English and Icelandic letter

References

  1. ^ "Icelandic language, alphabet and pronunciation". omniglot.com. Retrieved 2022-04-14.
  2. ^ a b Pétursson (1971:?), cited in Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:145)
  3. ^ a b Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), pp. 144–145.
  4. ^ Einarsson, Stefán (1949). Icelandic: Grammar, Texts, Glossary. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 22–23.
  5. ^
    ISBN 9780367581565. Archived
    (PDF) from the original on 2022-07-10. The types used by Caxton and his contemporaries originated in Holland and Belgium, and did not provide for the continuing use of elements of the Old English alphabet such as thorn <þ>, eth <ð>, and yogh <ʒ>. The substitution of visually similar typographic forms has led to some anomalies which persist to this day in the reprinting of archaic texts and the spelling of regional words. The widely misunderstood 'ye' occurs through a habit of printer's usage that originates in Caxton's time, when printers would substitute the <y> (often accompanied by a superscript <e>) in place of the thorn <þ> or the eth <ð>, both of which were used to denote both the voiced and non-voiced sounds, /ð/ and /θ/ (Anderson, D. (1969) The Art of Written Forms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p 169)
  6. ^ "ye-olde - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and usage notes | Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com". www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com. Retrieved 2019-12-13.
  7. ^ "1611 The Authorized King James Bible". archive.org. p. 1400. Retrieved August 14, 2022.
  8. ^ "Icelandic BGN/PCGN 1968 Agreement" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2016-10-26.
  9. ISBN 0-19-811184-3
    .
  10. ^ First Grammatical Treatise, eText (modernized spelling ed.), NO: Old.
  11. JSTOR 522272
    .
  12. ^ Everson, Michael; Baker, Peter; Emiliano, António; Grammel, Florian; Haugen, Odd Einar; Luft, Diana; Pedro, Susana; Schumacher, Gerd; Stötzner, Andreas (2006-01-30). "L2/06-027: Proposal to add Medievalist characters to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2013-08-19.
  13. ^ Everson, Michael; West, Andrew (2020-10-05). "L2/20-268: Revised proposal to add ten characters for Middle English to the UCS" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2020-10-24.

Bibliography

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Þ.
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