tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 15 07:41:46 1995
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Thorn and Dhaet was Re: ye and thee
Mark's addition to Lawrence's thorn/edh comments remind me of one
language that didn't give into the printing press....
Icelandic! It uses thorn for unvoiced th and edh/dhaet for voiced th (dh).
Gives it a real nice look.
Of course, they purposely distinguish thorn from edh/dhaet, which could
have been done in English, yet never was. I do seem to remember from my
Anglo-Saxon, that edh was usually always used in the final position in
verb inflections...
Too bad English didn't hang on to them... Boy with th symbols, English
would be in a much better position...
And as for wynn (the pre-Norman letter for w), those of you following
this thorny discussion, might not know that it looked almost exactly like
the letter p. In Anglo-Saxon, p is a very rare letter. The distinction
for wynn and thorn from p and b was of course, a good Scribe put the
"hook" or "thorn" into wynn and thorn; whereas p and b are always rounded.
Hmmm. Gee, no one's mentioned my favorite, "yogh" yet! :-)
Dave.