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'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 ''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).

Contents

Usage in English

Old English Usage

Thorn in Middle and Early Modern English

Abbreviations using Thorn

Modern usages of Thorn

Thorn and computers

Trivia

External links

References

Usage in English

Old English Usage

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''.

Thorn in 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 is 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. 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 using Thorn

The following were abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter Thorn:

★ – a Middle English abbreviation for the word ''the''

★ – a Middle English abbreviation for the word ''that''

★ – a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word ''thou'' (which was written early on as ''þu'' or ''þou'')

★ – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word ''the''

★ – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word ''that''

Modern usages of Thorn

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 // 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.

Thorn and 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 or via CTRL from Canadian Multilingual Standard but is not found on most keyboard layouts.
Different operating systems and windows 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. Wordprocessor software such as Open Office text or Microsoft Word have similar utilities. Users can often also 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 (e.g. for X Window: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/Blog/custom-keyboard-in-linuxx11

Trivia

★ The thorn rune is used as a symbol of evil in some of the later Halloween movies.

★ Thorn is sometimes used as part of the emoticon :-þ (or :Þ, :þ, :-Þ), representing a face with a tongue sticking out. Another emoticon, depicting a man in a hat is (-:þ.

★ The thorn is one of the few letters of the alphabets derived from the Latin where the modern capital form is smaller in height than the lower case form.

External links

★ Michael Everson's essay On the status of the Latin letter þorn and of its sorting order

★ Oxford Dictionary's FAQ: Why is 'ye' used instead of 'the' in antique English?

★ Thorn and Eth: How to get them right

References

★ Freeborn, Dennis (1992). ''From Old English to Standard English''. London: MacMillan.