Re: USAGE: Thorn vs Eth

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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