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Re: Orthography help needed

From:Tim May <butsuri@...>
Date:Friday, April 9, 2004, 0:25
Joe wrote at 2004-04-06 20:14:36 (+0100)
 > Mark J. Reed wrote:
 >
 > >On Mon, Apr 05, 2004 at 04:19:01PM -0400, Trebor Jung wrote:
 > >
 > >
 > >>What are those characters? They aren't readable by me.
 > >>
 > >>
 > >
 > >Which is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to include them in the
 > >orthography.  I'd like to stick to Latin-1 if possible.
 > >
 > >The characters are edh, eng, thorn, and theta, respectively.  At
 > >least edh and thorn are in Latin-1, so these should be legible:
 > ><$,3u=(B>, <$,3u=(B>.  I might end up admitting them, but I'm reluctant to
 > >introduce unfamiliar letters.
 > >
 > >
 > >
 >
 >
 > You know, I don't really like calling it 'edh', because that diagraph is
 > ufamiliar to English, and that's not the sound it has represented in
 > English either(at least not consistently).  I really do prefer 'eth'.

If I might offer a counter-argument: While the letter in question did
not consistently represent /D/ in Old English, it does in Icelandic
and in the IPA and our use of the letter here normally reflects this.
As such, it seems reasonable to pronounce it as /ED/ rather than /ET/.
A final /D/ after a short vowel is extremely unusual in English and
the natural pronunciation of |eth| is surely /ET/.  For these reasons
I prefer the spelling "edh".

Reply

Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>