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

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. I believe
the current voiced interpretation of eth comes from the fact that in at
least some areas (i suppose more northerly, otherwise the initial
voicing rule would make this rule nonsense), thorn was used
word-initially (where it represented [T]) and eth word-medially and
-finally (where it often represented [D]). I suppose similarities
between eth and d helped it along.

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                          |                 to make you everybody else---
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