It might be specific to Lemmy, as I’ve only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can’t possibly be easier than just writing “th”? And in many comments I see “th” and “þ” being used interchangeably.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
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 originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Futhark 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]
I think it’s just that one guy and it’s kind of their whole thing.
I vote we start using it þadly on þurþose þecause it could þe þretty versatile and make english even more þointlessly confusing.
Huh, I’ve never seen it
Because they’re pretentious twats who can’t even use it correctly.
On PieFed, that character is automatically converted to ‘th’.
For fun.
I thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.
Interesting what’s written here, I actually saw it more often in some Discord server. As far as I know, there it is just for fun and/or homestuck nostalgia, without any deeper meaning behind it.
Just like calling X “twitter” or “the hellsite”, or annotating everything with parenthesis, or using or refusing to use emoji, there does not need to be more of a reason to do something with written language than “I like it that way”. How much stylisation you can inject into your writing before you stop being comprehensible is another question.
It’s just that one guy i think
Yep
Honestly þis þread makes me sad. Can’t a fella be a lil quirky in peace?
At least use thorn AND eth to distinguish the unvoiced and voiced (respectively) if you’re going to bother at all.
Unvoiced and voiced? Which of my uses is which here?
It “should” be:
Honestly ðis þread makes me sad. Can’t a fella be a li’l quirky in peace?
You can make the þ sound by itself without using your voice. It just sounds like air coming out of a tire. You can’t make the ð sound without also making a vowel sound.
Ðough historically the þorn was often used for boþ as well, and it’s definitely tricky for modern Eŋlish speakers to distiŋuish.
Voiced is like the th in the, unvoiced is like the th in thin.
Unvoiced sounds the same whispered, whereas voiced loses its buzz when you whisper.
Voiced (eth):
this that then with the then breathe bother those thoughUnvoiced (thorn):
thread thin thanks width breath both youth pithy smith thatch thought throughout thoroughInterestingly, Icelandic and Old English used thorn for the voiced one too, but with the introduction of eth, that usage dropped out of Icelandic and with the introduction of the printing press, y got substituted for thorn in English, resulting in “ye” for the, which was never pronounced “yee”, always “the”.
Arguably, the printing press came at exactly the wrong time for English, which was at a time of language change and inconsistency, and we got stuck with some very inconsistent spelling. For example, the letter cluster (grapheme) ough represents different sounds (phonemes) in though (oh) thought (or) throughout (oo, ow) thorough (uh), partly because the Old English/Lowland Scots sound gh was on its way out. In Lowland Scots (much closer to Old English than Modern English), night is pronounced similarly to the German word nicht, but gh is voiced when ch is unvoiced.
To tell which sounds are voiced or voiceless, put a finger or two on your larynx and look for the vibration. /th/ as in “thread” is voiceless - no vibration - whereas /th/ in “the” is voiced - vibration
Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way ‽
It looks suspiciously Cyrillic.
I don’t know, but I downvote every improper use of the thorn.
What is an improper use?
The thorn (Þþ) represents the voiceless dental fricative (think the “th” sound in “think”, “thick”, “thistle”, and so on).
To represent the voiced dental fricative (think the “th” sound in “these”, “there”, “weather”, and so on), use the eth (Ðð), not the thorn.
The improper use here would be to confuse the two.
In modern Icelandic, yes, and that’s certainly more pleasing, but historically thorn was also used for the voiced phoneme, and with the advent of printing press (which didn’t get imported with a thorn), it got written y, which is how you got “ye olde”.
Finally, new letter to name a language after!
What kind of features should I add to þlang (or Thornlang)?
