Some of you may have noticed that in the television pictures from Iceland the principal bank is described as Kaupþing, rather than Kaupthing as in the British press. What is this peculiar letter "þ"?
As a former student of Old English and Old Norse (yes really), I can advise you that it is the letter thorn, used extensively in both those languages to represent the sounds usually spelled "th" in modern English. I was pleased to see that it has survived in modern Icelandic, together with its confrere, the letter "ð", known as eth and used to represent the same sounds in those ancient languages.
However, back to our friend thorn. Thorn survived through early middle English, but when printing first arrived in the UK from Germany, there was a problem in that the printing sets did not have the letter thorn. Accordingly, the early printers substituted the letter "y" which looked vaguely similar. And this is the explanation for such phrases as "ye olde tea shoppe". Nobody ever actually pronounced it as "ye" - it was a misprinting of þe (the).
Not a lot of people know that.
2 comments:
Of course, thorn is the voiceless consonant (so is pronounced like the th in 'thing' and 'thought', also Welsh < th >), while eth is it voiced counterpart (as in 'the', 'this' and 'that', as well as Welsh < dd >). So the printing press debacle shows the lenition that took place, reducing the definite article to [ðə].
And eth has survived beyond the Nordic shores: it is now the International Phonetic Alphabet glyph for a voiced dental fricative, the technical term for the sound eth represents.
Thorn, alas, has been overlooked: the phoneticians preferred the use of the Greek theta to represent the voiceless dental fricative in the IPA.
Of course, given this current crisis, I daresay there'll be quite a few people round these parts who will never want to see another thorn in their lives.
þuffering þuccotað!
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