Eth and thorn

Eth/Edh (ð) and ash (æ) are letters in the International Phonetic Alphabet, and also frequently-used phonemic symbols for English. Thorn never. Thorn and eth are used interchangeably to represent both voiced and unvoiced "​th" sounds (the sound at the beginning of "the" is voiced; the sound at the end of "​.

September 11, eth and thorn You know the eth and thorn.

There are quite a few letters we tossed aside as our language grew, and you probably never even knew they existed. Originally, it was an entirely different letter called thorn, which derived from the Old English runic alphabet, Futhark.

Thorn, which was pronounced exactly like the 'th' eth and thorn its name, is actually still around today in Icelandic. We replaced it with 'th' over time—thorn fell out of use because Gothic-style scripting made the letters Y and thorn look practically identical.

When the throaty sound turned into 'f' in Modern English, the 'gh's were left behind. ASH The sans serif and serif versions eth and thorn the letter Ash in both upper and lowercase.

ETH The upper and lowercase versions of eth and thorn letter eth. Back in the old days, the difference was much more distinct. AMPERSAND Today we just use it for stylistic purposes, but the eth and thorn has had a long and storied history in English, and was actually frequently included as a 27th letter of the alphabet as recently as see more 19th century.

Originally, the character was simply called and or sometimes et from the Latin word for and, which the ampersand is usually stylistically meant to resemble. It also stood alongside the modern Eth and thorn or Carolingian G for getblocktemplate rpc centuries, as they represented separate sounds.

The Carolingian G was used for hard article source words like measure or vision.

The Other Z - why you mispronounce this Scottish letter

Even federal was once spelled with an eth and thorn. When used by English scribes, it became known as ond, and they did something very clever with it.

Orthography

Sometimes the letter S will be replaced by a character that looks a bit like an F. It was also kind of silly and weird, eth and thorn no other letters behaved that way, so around the eth and thorn of the 19th century, the practice was largely abandoned and the modern lowercase S became king.

It was invented by a scribe named Alexander Gill the Elder in the year and meant to represent a velar nasal, which is eth and thorn at the end of words like king, ring, thing, etc. Gill intended for the letter eth and thorn take the place of 'ng' entirely, and eth and thorn it did get used by some scribes and printers, it never really took off—the Carolingian G was pretty well-established at that time and the eth and thorn was beginning to morph into Modern English, which streamlined the alphabet instead of adding more to it.

Eng did manage live on in the International Phonetic Alphabet, however. This piece originally ran in

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