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Thorn (letter)

January 19, 2024

Not to be confused with the rune of the same name, from which it is derived, the Latin letter P, or ϸ, the Graeco-Bactrian letter Sho.

Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but it was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ 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]

Þ
Þ þ
Usage
Writing systemAdapted from Futhark and Futhorc into Latin script
TypeAlphabetic and logographic
Language of originOld English language
Old Norse language
Phonetic usage[θ]
[ð]
[θ̠]
[z]
/θɔːrn/
Unicode codepointU+00DE, U+00FE
History
Development
ᚦ
  • Þ þ
Time period~800 to present
Descendantsꝥ, þͤ, þͭ, þͧ, yᷤ, yͤ, yͭ, (possibly) 𐌸
SistersNone
Transliteration equivalentsΘ, 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.

It is pronounced as either a voiceless dental fricative [θ] or its voiced counterpart [ð]. However, in modern Icelandic, it is pronounced as a laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative [θ̠],[2][3] similar to th as in the English word thick, or a (usually apical) 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 edit

English edit

Old English edit

The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, as was 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 edit

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

The modern digraph th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century; at the same time, the shape of ⟨Þ⟩ grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender (becoming similar in appearance to the old wynn (⟨Ƿ⟩, ⟨ƿ⟩), which had fallen out of use by 1300, and to ancient through modern ⟨P⟩, ⟨p⟩). By this stage, th was predominant and the use of ⟨Þ⟩ was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. This was the longest-lived use, though with the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of ⟨y⟩ for ⟨Þ⟩ became ubiquitous, leading to the common "ye", as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that ⟨Y⟩ existed in the printer's types that were imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while ⟨Þ⟩ did not.[5] The word was never pronounced as /j/, as in ⟨yes⟩, though, even when so written.[6] The first printing of the 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 edit
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:

  •   (þͤ) – a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
  •   (þͭ) – a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
  •   (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
  •   (yͤ) – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
  •   (yͭ) – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that

Modern English edit

Thorn in the form of a "Y" survives in pseudo-archaic uses, particularly the stock prefix "ye olde". 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 edit

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

Icelandic edit

Icelandic is the only living language to keep the letter thorn (in Icelandic; þ, pronounced þoddn, [θ̠ɔtn̥] or þorn [θ̠ɔrn̥]). The letter is the 30th in the Icelandic alphabet, modelled after Old Norse alphabet in the 19th century; it is transliterated to th when it cannot be reproduced[8] and never appears at the end of a word. For example, the name of Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson is anglicised as Hafthor.

Its pronunciation has not varied much, but before the introduction of the eth character, þ was used to represent the sound [ð], as in the word "verþa", which is now spelt verða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic or normalized orthography.[9] Þ was originally taken from 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 edit

character Þ þ
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN
Unicode 00DE 00FE
Character entity reference Þ þ
Windows-1252,
ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15		 DE FE
LaTeX \TH \th

Variants edit

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

See also edit

  • 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 edit

  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. ^ a b Hill, Will (30 June 2020). "Chapter 25: Typography and the printed English text" (PDF). The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System. p. 6. ISBN 9780367581565. (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). (PDF) from the original on 2016-10-26.
  9. ^ Gordon, E.V. (1927). An Introduction to Old Norse. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 268. ISBN 0-19-811184-3.
  10. ^ First Grammatical Treatise, eText (modernized spelling ed.), NO: Old.
  11. ^ Haugen, Einar (1950). "First Grammatical Treatise. The Earliest Germanic Phonology". Language. 26 (4): 4–64. doi:10.2307/522272. ISSN 0097-8507. 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). (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). (PDF) from the original on 2020-10-24.

Bibliography edit

External links edit

 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Þ.

January 19, 2024
thorn, letter, confused, with, rune, same, name, from, which, derived, latin, letter, graeco, bactrian, letter, thorn, þorn, letter, english, norse, swedish, modern, icelandic, alphabets, well, modern, transliterations, gothic, alphabet, middle, scots, some, d. Not to be confused with the rune of the same name from which it is derived the Latin letter P or ϸ the Graeco Bactrian letter Sho Thorn or thorn TH th is a letter in the Old English Old Norse Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet Middle Scots and some dialects of Middle English It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but it was later replaced with the digraph th except in Iceland where it survives The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Futhark 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 th is currently in use is Icelandic 1 THTH thUsageWriting systemAdapted from Futhark and Futhorc into Latin scriptTypeAlphabetic and logographicLanguage of originOld English languageOld Norse languagePhonetic usage 8 d 8 z 8 ɔːr n Unicode codepointU 00DE U 00FEHistoryDevelopmentᚦTH thTime period 800 to presentDescendantsꝥ th th th y y y possibly 𐌸SistersNoneTransliteration equivalents8 thOtherOther letters commonly used withth dhWriting directionLeft to rightThis 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 It is pronounced as either a voiceless dental fricative 8 or its voiced counterpart d However in modern Icelandic it is pronounced as a laminal voiceless alveolar non sibilant fricative 8 2 3 similar to th as in the English word thick or a usually apical voiced alveolar non sibilant fricative d 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 D d however d may occur as an allophone of 8 and written th 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 f and in some especially italic fonts the Latin letters f and ſ long s Contents 1 Uses 1 1 English 1 1 1 Old English 1 1 2 Middle and Early Modern English 1 1 2 1 Abbreviations 1 1 3 Modern English 1 2 Khmer 1 3 Icelandic 2 Computing codes 3 Variants 4 See also 5 References 6 Bibliography 7 External linksUses editEnglish edit Old English edit The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on as was d called eth Unlike eth thorn remained in common use through most of the Middle English period Both letters were used for the phoneme 8 sometimes by the same scribe This sound was regularly realised in Old English as the voiced fricative d between voiced sounds but either letter could be used to write it the modern use of d 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 edit nbsp hir the grace that god put Extract from the The Boke of Margery Kempe The modern digraph th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century at the same time the shape of TH grew less distinctive with the letter losing its ascender becoming similar in appearance to the old wynn Ƿ ƿ which had fallen out of use by 1300 and to ancient through modern P p By this stage th was predominant and the use of TH was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations This was the longest lived use though with the arrival of movable type printing the substitution of y for TH became ubiquitous leading to the common ye as in Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe One major reason for this was that Y existed in the printer s types that were imported from Belgium and the Netherlands while TH did not 5 The word was never pronounced as j as in yes though even when so written 6 The first printing of the 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 edit Abbreviations of the nbsp Middle English th with superscript e nbsp Blackletter y with superscript e The following were scribal abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn nbsp th a Middle English abbreviation for the word the nbsp th a Middle English abbreviation for the word that nbsp th a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou which was written early on as thu or thou In later printed texts given the lack of a sort for the glyph 5 printers substituted the visually similar letter y for the thorn y an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this nbsp y an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the nbsp y an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word thatModern English edit Thorn in the form of a Y survives in pseudo archaic uses particularly the stock prefix ye olde 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 edit THth is sometimes used in Khmer romanization to represent ធ tho Icelandic edit Icelandic is the only living language to keep the letter thorn in Icelandic th pronounced thoddn 8 ɔtn or thorn 8 ɔrn The letter is the 30th in the Icelandic alphabet modelled after Old Norse alphabet in the 19th century it is transliterated to th when it cannot be reproduced 8 and never appears at the end of a word For example the name of Hafthor Julius Bjornsson is anglicised as Hafthor Its pronunciation has not varied much but before the introduction of the eth character th was used to represent the sound d as in the word vertha which is now spelt verda meaning to become in modern Icelandic or normalized orthography 9 TH was originally taken from the runic alphabet and is described in the First Grammatical Treatise from the 12th century Staf thann er flestir menn kalla th thann kalla eg af thvi heldur the ad tha er thad atkvaedi hans i hverju mali sem eftir lifir nafnsins er ur er tekinn raddarstafur ur nafni hans sem alla hefi eg samhljodendur samda i thad mark nu sem eg reit snemma i theirra umraedu Hofudstaf the sins rita eg hvergi nema i vers upphafi thvi ad hans atkvaedi ma eigi aexla thott hann standi eftir raddarstaf i samstofun 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 nbsp Upper and lowercase versions of the thorn character in sans serif left and serif right Computing codes editcharacter TH thUnicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN LATIN SMALL LETTER THORNUnicode 00DE 00FECharacter entity reference amp THORN amp thorn Windows 1252 ISO 8859 1 ISO 8859 15 DE FELaTeX TH thVariants editVarious forms of thorn were used for medieval scribal abbreviations 12 U A764 Ꝥ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE U A765 ꝥ LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE U A766 Ꝧ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER U A767 ꝧ LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER U A7D3 LATIN SMALL LETTER DOUBLE THORN was used in the Middle English Ormulum 13 See also editPronunciation 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 D another Old English and Icelandic letterReferences edit Icelandic language alphabet and pronunciation omniglot com Retrieved 2022 04 14 a b Petursson 1971 cited in Ladefoged amp Maddieson 1996 145 a b Ladefoged amp Maddieson 1996 pp 144 145 Einarsson Stefan 1949 Icelandic Grammar Texts Glossary Baltimore The Johns Hopkins Press pp 22 23 a b Hill Will 30 June 2020 Chapter 25 Typography and the printed English text PDF The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System p 6 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 lt th gt eth lt d gt and yogh lt ʒ gt 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 lt y gt often accompanied by a superscript lt e gt in place of the thorn lt th gt or the eth lt d gt both of which were used to denote both the voiced and non voiced sounds d and 8 Anderson D 1969 The Art of Written Forms New York Holt Rinehart and Winston p 169 ye olde Definition pictures pronunciation and usage notes Oxford Advanced Learner s Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries com www oxfordlearnersdictionaries com Retrieved 2019 12 13 1611 The Authorized King James Bible archive org p 1400 Retrieved August 14 2022 Icelandic BGN PCGN 1968 Agreement PDF Archived PDF from the original on 2016 10 26 Gordon E V 1927 An Introduction to Old Norse New York Oxford University Press p 268 ISBN 0 19 811184 3 First Grammatical Treatise eText modernized spelling ed NO Old Haugen Einar 1950 First Grammatical Treatise The Earliest Germanic Phonology Language 26 4 4 64 doi 10 2307 522272 ISSN 0097 8507 JSTOR 522272 Everson Michael Baker Peter Emiliano Antonio Grammel Florian Haugen Odd Einar Luft Diana Pedro Susana Schumacher Gerd Stotzner 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 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 editFreeborn Dennis 1992 From Old English to Standard English London Macmillan Ladefoged Peter Maddieson Ian 1996 The Sounds of the World s Languages Oxford Blackwell ISBN 0 631 19815 6 Petursson Magnus 1971 Etude de la realisation des consonnes islandaises th d s dans la prononciation d un sujet islandais a partir de la radiocinematographie Phonetica 33 4 203 216 doi 10 1159 000259344 S2CID 145316121External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to TH Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Thorn letter amp oldid 1187048459, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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