Thorn (letter)
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Thorn, or þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic alphabets. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with th. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ, called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thurs ("giant") in the Scandinavian rune poems, its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being *Thurisaz.
It has the sound of either a voiceless interdental fricative, like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative, like th as in the English word the. In Modern Icelandic the usage is restricted to the former. The voiced form is represented with the letter eth (Ð, ð), though that letter can also be unvoiced, depending on position within a sentence.
Usage in English
The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, like eth; unlike eth, it remained in common usage through most of the Middle English period.The modern digraph th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century; at the same time, the shape of the thorn 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, in some hands, such as that of the scribe of the unique mid-15th century manuscript of The Boke of Margery Kempe, ultimately becoming indistinguishable from the letter Y. By this stage th was predominant, however, and the usage of the thorn was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In William Caxton's pioneering printed English, it is rare except in an abbreviated the, written with a thorn and a superscript E. This was the longest-lived usage, though the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous. The first printing of the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 used the Y form of the thorn with a superscript E in places such as Job 1:9, John 15:1, and Romans 15:29. It also used a similar form with a superscript T, which was an abbreviated that, in places such as 2 Corinthians 13:7. All were replaced in later printings by the or that, respectively. The thorn in the form of a Y survives to this day in pseudo-archaic usages, particularly the stock prefix "Ye olde...".
The definite article spelled with Y for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced "yee" or mistaken for the archaic nominative case of you, written ye. It is used infrequently in some modern English word games to replace the "th" with a single letter.
Trivia
- The thorn rune is used as a symbol of evil in some of the later Halloween movies.
- Þ and þ can be generated on an English keyboard. Using Microsoft Windows, one must hold Alt while typing 0222 or 0254 respectively on the numeric keypad. Under Mac OS X, this character can be typed by choosing [link] the "U.S. Extended Keyboard" layout and typing option-T or shift-option-T.[link] One can also obtain it from Windows' Character Map or Mac OS X's Character Palette. On UNIX-like systems such as Linux it can be entered with the Compose key plus t and h or T and H for the uppercase version.
- The thorn is sometimes used as part of the emoticon :-Þ, representing a face with a tongue sticking out.
External links
- Michael Everson's essay [On the status of the Latin letter þorn and of its sorting order]
- Oxford Dictionary's FAQ: [Why is 'ye' used instead of 'the' in antique English?]
- [Thorn and Eth: How to get them right]
References
- Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan.
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