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 language alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in Middle Ages Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the runic alphabet in the Elder Futhark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian . 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 ,[, cited in ] similar to th as in the English word thick, or a (usually Apical consonant) voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative ,
In typography, the lowercase thorn glyph is unusual in that 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 (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 grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender (becoming similar in appearance to the old
wynn (, ), which had fallen out of use by 1300, and to ancient through modern , ). 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
Movable type 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
The following were scribal abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:
-
The thorn with stroke (or barred thorn) 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" (neuter nominative / accusative)
-
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 (which was written early on as þu or þou)
In later printed texts, given the lack of a sort for the glyph,
printers substituted the (visually similar) 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 phrase "
ye olde". The
definite article spelt with "Y" for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced ("yee") or mistaken for the archaic
nominative case of the second person plural pronoun, "ye", as in "hear ye!".
Icelandic
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
transliteration 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
as Haf
thor.
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 " ver þa", which is now spelt ver ða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic or normalized orthography.
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 |
Computing codes
Uppercase and lowercase forms of thorn have
Unicode encodings:
These Unicode were inherited from ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin-1") encoding.
Variants
Various forms of thorn were used for medieval scribal abbreviations:
-
was used in the Middle English Ormulum
See also
-
Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩
-
Sho (letter), , a similar letter in the Greek alphabet used to write the Bactrian language
-
Yogh, , a letter used in Middle English and Older Scots
-
Wynn, , another runic letter used in Old English
-
Eth, , another Old English and Icelandic letter
Notes
Bibliography
-
Freeborn, Dennis (1992) From Old English to Standard English. London: Macmillan
External links
