Re: CHAT: A sample of my newborn conlang

From: "Karapcik, Mike" <Karapcik@...>

|         If you mean the "hard-th" (theta) and "soft-th" (thelta), it's
| Icelandic. /T/ is thorn (take a "P" and move the bowl half way down the
| stem) and /D/ is eth (D with a dash in the stem). Old English also had thorn
| and eth. (I think in Middle English thorn changed shape to the "Greek Y", or
| our modern "y".)
|         If you mean the "soft-T" and "soft-D", Czech does this. It's the
| T-hacek and D-hacek. (Though in lower case letters, the t and d are usually
| followed by an apostrophe.) However, Czech is Slavic, so I doubt this is
| what you mean.

I was talking about the interdental fricatives, the two "th"s.

The thorn letter (Þ þ) came from the third Futhark rune, and it represents a
thorny tree of some kind. The eth (Ð ð) is simply D/d with a stroke and might
have some origins in Old Irish (which used d with a dot on top). Also, I read
that the lower case eth should be written with a single diagonal stroke, but
older conventions (including an earlier form of IPA) used a crooked "swastika"
mark, which is an overelaboration.

Incidentally, I use thorn and edh in Latin-1 transliteration in languages like
Arabic and Greek which have interdentals. I also use either one as an
abbreviation in a type of shorthand I'm working on, for the word "the" and
sometimes "this" or "that" as well. It's something with a similar usage to the
ampersand & and the at-sign @.

~Danny~


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