Re: USAGE: OE pt was Re: USAGE:Yet another few questions about Welsh.

On Tuesday, July 13, 2004, at 11:43 , Tristan Mc Leay wrote:

> Joe wrote:
>>
>> Why did OE have both þ and ð, anyway?  It could have done perfectly well
>> with just one.  Maybe they were originally coined to represent [T] and
>> [D], but then someone got confused.
>
> IIUC, it was simply that when confronted with this unwriteable phoneme,
> one group of scribes (mostly Irish/Celtic, I understand) put a slash
> through <d> (with, then, was of course curvy like an eth is still), and
> the other (presumably English/germanic) latinised the Runic thorn. They
> both simply stayed in competition with each other for a while.
Spot on!

> I believe
> the current voiced interpretation of eth comes from the fact that in at
> least some areas
The current interpretation of eth as [D] and thorn as [T] is due, surely,
mainly to the use of these two symbols in Icelandic, helped by the fact
that eth looks like 'modified D', i.e. is thought of as "dh", and the
initial sound of thorn is so obviously [T].

But as Tristan so rightly says, this was not the ancient usage. Some
writers adopted the symbol eth for the OE /T/ (with allophones [T] and [D]
), while others simply adopted the old Runic symbol thorn. After the
Norman invasion, the Norman scribes with their fondness for digraphs, used
'th'. This did not abolish the older methods; it merely set up a _third_
method of writing the same phoneme!

Eth seems to have disappeared during the Middle English period, but thorn
survived until the advent of printing. Caxton & other early printers,
using fonts produced on the continent, lacked symbol thorn and substituted
|y| instead. Hence we find spellings like _ye_ (the), _yat_ (that), wiy
(with) etc. The first still lingers on - and is almost always
mispronounced - in pseudo-archaic spellings like "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe"
(lots of tea shops in medieval England, of course  :)

Clearly, the writing of thorn as |y| was not desirable. But, alas, rather
than create new fonts for thorn, the printers printers simply adopted the
Norman _th_ digraph which we use till today. Only the Icelanders AFAIK now
use eth and thorn.

Ray
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