this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
758 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
58970 readers
3680 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is there a reason that you use some character (I'm afraid I don't know the name of it) wherever you would otherwise use "th"? I can't guess if it's some kind of technical issue with federated text, something from a different language you're incorporating, or one of those "I think we should add x symbol to the language so I'll use it to draw attention to the effort" deals, like with the people that use the combined !? symbols whenever both are relevant at once.
It's a thorn, a letter making a th sound. Still in use in Icelandic, I think. In English, it's archaic at best.
Fun fact, when it fell out of use, the letter Y was used to replace it for a while. So when you see something saying "ye olde", verbally it's still "the old".
It's eth, actually, not thorn.
I had thought that eth was used in Old English for the voiced "th" and thorn for the unvoiced "th", but Wikipedia says they were used interchangeably for both sounds.
You're right otherwise. Thorn was not available on printing presses because they were being made in countries that didn't use the letter, which is why the letter Y was used instead until "th" became more common.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth
That's a shame, I would have loved to keep using those thorns and eths. Quite weird to think that they didn't even want to ask for a few customs pieces for those letters.