Everything about Thorn Letter totally explained
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 in the
Elder Fuþark, called
thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and
thorn or
thurs ("
giant") in the Scandinavian
rune poems, its reconstructed
Proto-Germanic name being
*Thurisaz.
It has the sound of either a
voiceless dental 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 eth can be unvoiced, depending on position within a sentence, in which case its
IPA representation is given as θ (
theta).
In its
typography, the thorn is one of the few
characters in the
alphabets derived from the Latin where the modern
lower case form has greater height than the
capital in its normal (
roman), non-
italic form.
English usage
Old English
The letter thorn was used for writing
Old English very early on, like
ð; unlike ð, it remained in common usage through most of the
Middle English period. A thorn with the
ascender crossed was a popular abbreviation for the word
that.
Middle and Early Modern English
The modern
digraph th began to grow in popularity during the
14th century; at the same time, the shape of 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 thorn was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In
William Caxton's pioneering printed English, it's 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,leading to the common ye
s as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe',that we know and love today. One major reason for this is that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, and Thorn did not. The first printing of the
King James Version of the Bible in 1611 used the Y form of 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.
Abbreviations
The following were abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:
- – (Y^e) a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
- – (Y^t) a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
- – (Y^u) a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou (which was written early on as þu or þou)
- - (Y^s) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this
- – (Y^e) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
- – (Y^t) an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that
Modern English
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 /ji/ 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.
On computers
Þ and þ are part of
Unicode and can be found at U+00DE and U+00FE respectively. The character can be typed directly from a
standard Icelandic keyboard, with a CTRL key-combination from a
Canadian Multilingual Standard or with AltGr from a
US-International keyboard, but isn't found on most keyboard layouts.
Different operating systems and window managers allow users to access the character in different ways. Almost all have some form of character map utility that allows users to copy and paste the character into a text. Word processing software such as OpenOffice.org Writer or Microsoft Word have similar utilities. Also, users often can switch keyboard layouts, customise an existing keyboard layout, or enter the letter directly using a character code. Advice on accessing the character on specific operating systems can be found in many places on the
Internet (for example for X Window:
(External Link
)).
Popular culture
The thorn rune is used as a symbol of evil in some films in the Halloween series.
Thorn is sometimes used as part of the emoticon :-þ (or =Þ, :Þ, :þ, :-Þ, ;Þ), representing a face with a tongue sticking out. Another emoticon, depicting a man in a hat is (-:þ.Further Information
Get more info on 'Thorn Letter'.
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