Thorn (letter)

Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Gothic, Old Norse, Old Swedish, and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but 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.

Not to be confused with the rune of the same name, from which it is derived, or ϸ, the Graeco-Bactrian letter Sho.
Þ
Þ þ
Usage
Writing systemLatin 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
SistersNone
Transliteration equivalentsΘ, th
Other
Other letters commonly used withth, dh

It is pronounced as either a voiceless dental fricative [θ] or the voiced counterpart of it [ð]. However, in modern Icelandic, it is pronounced as a laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative [θ̠],[1][2] similar to th as in the English word thick, or a (usually apical) voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative [ð̠],[1][2] 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.[3]

In typography, the lowercase thorn character is unusual in that it has both an ascender and a descender (other examples are lowercase Cyrillic ф and in some fonts, the Latin letter f).

Uses

Old English

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

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). In some hands, such as that of the scribe of the unique mid-15th-century manuscript of The Boke of Margery Kempe, it ultimately became indistinguishable from the letter Y. By this stage, th was predominant and the use of Þ was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In William Caxton's pioneering printed English, it is rare except in an abbreviation for "the", written as þe. This was the longest-lived use, though the substitution of Y for Þ soon 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 type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, while Þ did not.[4] The word was never pronounced with a "y" sound, though, even when so written.[5] 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. 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

The following were 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)
  • (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

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!". In fact, the y in the pronoun would have been spelled with a yogh, ȝe, rather than a y.

Icelandic

Icelandic is the only living language to retain the letter thorn (in Icelandic; þ, pronounced þoddn, [θ̠ɔtn̥] or þordn [θ̠ɔrtn̥]). 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[6] 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 spelt verða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic or normalized orthography.[7] 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.[8]

– 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 woverl 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.[9]

– 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
characterÞþ
Unicode nameLATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORNLATIN SMALL LETTER THORN
Unicode00DE00FE
Character entity referenceÞþ
Windows-1252,
ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15		DEFE
LaTeX\TH\th

Variants

Various forms of thorn were used for medieval scribal abbreviations:[10]

See also

References
  1. Pétursson (1971:?), cited in Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996:145)
  2. Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), pp. 144–145.
  3. Einarsson, Stefán (1949). Icelandic: Grammar, Texts, Glossary. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. pp. 22–23.
  4. Wood, Henry Trueman (1870). Changes In The English Language: Between The Publication Of Wiclif's Bible And That Of The Authorised Version. A.d. 1400 To A.d. 1600. London, England: Macmillan & Company. p. 47–48. ISBN 1012789632.
  5. "ye-olde - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and usage notes | Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com". www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com. Retrieved 2019-12-13.
  6. "ICELANDIC BGN/PCGN 1968 Agreement" (PDF).
  7. Gordon, E.V. (1927). An Introduction to Old Norse. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 268. ISBN 0-19-811184-3.
  8. First Grammatical Treatise, eText (modernized spelling ed.), NO: Old.
  9. Haugen, Einar (1950). "First Grammatical Treatise. The Earliest Germanic Phonology". Language. 26 (4): 4–64. doi:10.2307/522272. ISSN 0097-8507. JSTOR 522272.
  10. 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).

Bibliography
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