tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Feb 15 09:41:16 1995
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Re: Thorn and Dhaet was Re: ye and thee
- From: "A.Appleyard" <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: Thorn and Dhaet was Re: ye and thee
- Date: Wed, 15 Feb 1995 16:21:17 GMT
- Priority: normal
David E G Sturm <[email protected]> wrote:-
> Too bad English didn't hang on to [thorn and edh] ... Boy with th symbols,
> English would be in a much better position...
Big negatory on that. To me, thorn looks too much like `p'. Some people let
their p's get like thorns, anyway. If I am in a hurry, I prefer to spell `th'
as Greek `theta', it's easier to distinguish and quicker to write than either
thorn or separate t+h. But Tolkien sometimes used thorn when handwriting
modern English.
> 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. ...
Wynn and thorn were runes that got taken into the Roman alphabet for Germanic
sounds that the Roman alphabet had no letters for, same as Roman Y Z were
taken from Greek, and Cyrillic `sh' and `ts' are Hebrew letters taken in, and
Coptic took in some Ancient Egyptian signs to fill out for Egyptian sounds
that there weren't Greek letters for.
> Hmmm. Gee, no one's mentioned my favorite, "yogh" yet! :-)
I think that `yogh' arose from a handwriting variant of `g'.