You can see more details if you do a search for "digraph" in the paper " The evolution of English dental fricatives: The explanation I remember seeing for the rise of the digraph “th” and fall of the letters thorn and eth in English spelling is influence from French spelling habits. All of which could have been avoided if Johannes Gutenberg had stuck to Unicode from the beginning. The use of y survives only in archaicisms like "ye olde shoppe", where it's now pronounced /j/ instead.Īnd English-speakers, understanding that revenge was a dish best served cold, went on to impose ASCII on the world and destroy dozens and dozens of other languages' unique letters in the same way. So the convention of using th took over, and þ vanished entirely. So in printed books, thorn generally had to be replaced either with th, or with the closest available character, y the latter was readable, but somewhat annoying and unintuitive (since þ and y are pronounced nothing alike). (Norman) French influences brought about some use of th, but þ was still widely popular and universally understood.īut German, French, Italian, and other prominent languages of the time didn't use thorn, and thus typefaces imported from Europe didn't include it. Instead, we lost both of these letters and use the digraph th instead.Įth was lost early, within Old English thorn survived all the way into Early Modern English, and is found in the first printing of the King James Bible. Indeed: thorn (þ) won, and eth (ð) died out. Intuitively, one might think that one of these letters would 'win', and replace the other. In some languages they were distinct, but in English, either letter could be used for voiced or voiceless. My understanding is that Old English had two letters, thorn and eth, which were used interchangeably to represent the sound th as in thin or father.
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