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Re: USAGE: Thorn vs Eth

From:Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>
Date:Tuesday, July 9, 2002, 11:30
On Tue, 2002-07-09 at 20:22, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
> En réponse à Abrigon Gusiq <abrigon@...>: > > > Easy to figure it out. > > > > Eth is the voiceless th. Like in Bath. > > Thorn is the voiced th. like in Then. > > > Except that it's exactly the opposite!!! > > Thorn is the *voiceless* th, like in bath or think, while eth is the *voiced* > th of then and that. That's why you often see it written 'edh' instead.
A better way of remembering it is that thorn is for thorn (and, depending on whose pronouncing it, sometimes for eth too).
> Or else, the IPA makers would have had a very warped mind to use edh to mark > the sound of the voiced th ([D] in X-SAMPA) in IPA! > > Too bad for the "easy to figure it out" ;)))) .
Bah, the voiced and voicelessness of 'th's is all a sham. (Linguists have a lot too answer for.) I blame the French for that, they never had any words with /D/ for us to borrow to make /T/ and /D/ better and distinguishing between themselves for us English speakers. I'll call them halfphonemes, so I can get the cluster 'fph', but also because saying /T@/ for /D@/ sounds merely mildly wrong, unlike saying /zup/ for /su:p/, which sounds like my grandfather ('Ah, that's hexcellent zup!', he said of Oma's soup often enough. The Dutch wouldn't normally have any reason to put a /h/ before a vowel, would they?). Hmm... at any rate, thorn is for thorn. <--- That paragraph is mostly humour. The seriousness of it is only in that bit about my grandfather (Dutch, from Zeeland I believe) putting a /h/ before 'excellent'. I've seen some argument somewhere about /T/ and /D/ not being properly phonemic. Tristan.

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Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>