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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 letters Eth ( ð , capital Ð ), transliterated as d , and Thorn ( þ , capital Þ ), transliterated as th , are widely used in the Icelandic language. Eth is also used in Faroese and Elfdalian , while thorn was used in many historical languages such as Old English .
In Old English texts, the stroke tended to be more slanted, while in Old Norse texts it was straight. In Middle English times, the ascender of the þ was reduced (making it similar to the Old English letter Wynn, ƿ), which caused the thorn with stroke abbreviation ( ) to be replaced with a thorn with a small t above the letter ( ).
It is one of the two runes (along with thorn, þ) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet (or any extension of the Latin alphabet). A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/ , /v/ , and /w/ .
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. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh , and later d .
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]
Futhorc influenced the emerging English alphabet by providing it with the letters thorn (Þ þ) and wynn (Ƿ ƿ). 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.