Thorn (letter)
Letter of Old English and some Scandinavian languages / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Thorn (letter)?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
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 it was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. The only language in which þ is currently in use is Icelandic.[1]
Þ | |
---|---|
Þ þ | |
Usage | |
Writing system | Adapted from Futhark and Futhorc into Latin script |
Type | Alphabetic and logographic |
Language of origin | Old English language Old Norse language |
Phonetic usage | [θ] [ð] [θ̠] [z] /θɔːrn/ |
Unicode codepoint | U+00DE, U+00FE |
History | |
Development | ᚦ
|
Time period | ~800 to present |
Descendants | ꝥ |
Sisters | None |
Transliteration equivalents | Θ, th |
Other | |
Other letters commonly used with | th, dh |
Writing direction | Left-to-right |
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. |
It is pronounced as either a voiceless dental fricative [θ] or its voiced counterpart [ð]. However, in modern Icelandic, it is pronounced as a laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative [θ̠],[2][3] similar to th as in the English word thick, or a (usually apical) voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative [ð̠],[2][3] similar to th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth ⟨Ð, ð⟩; however, [ð̠] may occur as an allophone of /θ̠/, and written ⟨þ⟩, when it appears in an unstressed pronoun or adverb after a voiced sound.[4]
In typography, the lowercase thorn character is unusual in that it has both an ascender and a descender (other examples are the lowercase Cyrillic ф, and, in some [especially italic] fonts, the Latin letters f and ſ [long s]).