Thorn (letter)


Thorn or þorn 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 was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune 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 þ is currently in use is Icelandic.
It represented a voiceless dental fricative or its voiced counterpart. However, in modern Icelandic it represents a laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative, similar to th as in the English word thick, or a voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative, similar to th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth ; however, may occur as an allophone of, and written, when it appears in an unstressed pronoun or adverb after a voiced sound.
In typography, the lowercase thorn character is unusual for it has both an ascender and a descender.

Uses

English

Old English

The letter thorn was used in Old English very early on, as was ð, which was called eth. Unlike eth, thorn remained in common use through most of the Middle English period. Both letters were used for the phoneme, sometimes by the same scribe. This sound was regularly realised in Old English as the voiced fricative between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it; the modern use of in phonetic alphabets is not the same as the Old English orthographic use. A thorn with the ascender crossed 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 grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender. By this stage, th was predominant and the use of 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 for became ubiquitous, leading to the common "ye", as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that existed in the printer's types that were imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while did not. The word was never pronounced as /j/, as in ⟨yes⟩, though, even when so written. 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 in Middle and Early Modern English



The following were scribal abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:
  • – The thorn with stroke is the earliest abbreviation, it is used in manuscripts in the Old English language. It is the letter, with a bold horizontal stroke through the ascender, and it represents the word þæt, meaning "the" or "that"
  • – a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
  • – a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
  • – a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou
In later printed texts, given the lack of a sort for the glyph, printers substituted the letter y for the thorn:
  • – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this
  • – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
  • – 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 phrase "ye olde". The definite article Þe (The

Icelandic

is the only living language to keep the letter thorn. In Icelandic, þ is pronounced þoddn, or þorn. 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 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, as in the word "verþa", which is now spelt verða in modern Icelandic or normalized orthography. 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.

– 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.

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

Image:Latin alphabet Þþ.svg|class=skin-invert-image|thumb|Upper- and lowercase versions of the thorn character, in sans-serif and serif

Computing codes

Uppercase and lowercase forms of thorn have Unicode encodings:
These Unicode codepoints were inherited from ISO/IEC 8859-1 encoding.

Variants

Various forms of thorn were used for medieval scribal abbreviations: