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Eth in Arial and Times New Roman. Eth (/ ɛ ð / edh, uppercase: Ð , lowercase: ð ; also spelled edh or eð), known as ðæt in Old English, [1] is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian.
Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives.
The letter eth ð was an alteration of Latin d , and the runic letters thorn þ and wynn ƿ are borrowings from futhorc. Also used was a symbol for the conjunction and , a character similar to the number seven ( ⁊ , called ond or a Tironian et ) which is still used in Irish and Scottish Gaelic , and a symbol for the relative pronoun þæt , a ...
The voiced dental fricative is a consonant sound used in some spoken languages.It is familiar to English-speakers as the th sound in father.Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is eth, or ð and was taken from the Old English and Icelandic letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced (inter)dental non-sibilant fricative.
In a tale from Bede's Ecclesiastical History (written in Latin), a man named Imma cannot be bound by his captors and is asked if he is using "litteras solutorias" (loosening letters) to break his binds. In one Old English translation of the passage, Imma is asked if he is using "drycraft" (magic, druidcraft) or "runestaves" to break his binds. [15]
While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph uu , scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn ᚹ for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use during the Middle English period, circa 1300. [2]
The letter eth (Ð ð) was later devised as a modification of dee (D d), and finally yogh (Ȝ ȝ) was created by Norman scribes from the insular g in Old English and Irish, and used alongside their Carolingian g. The a-e ligature ash (Æ æ) was adopted as a letter in its own right, named after a futhorc rune æsc.
Eth is also used in Faroese and Elfdalian, while thorn was used in many historical languages such as Old English. The letters æ (capital Æ ) and ö (capital Ö ) are considered as completely separate letters in Icelandic, and are collated as such, even though they originated as a ligature and a diacritical version respectively.