Re: Scripts

On Sun, 2002-07-07 at 06:07, Ray Brown wrote:
> On Friday, July 5, 2002, at 09:49 , Nik Taylor wrote:
>
> > Joe wrote:
> >>
> >> Yeah, I miss þ and ð.  Especially þ, but at least you can still type
> >> them.
> >> (who would have thought, ancient symbols still being available on a
> >> computer
> >> 800 years after their abandonment)
> >
> > The Icelanders still use ð and, I think, þ.
>
> Yes they do.
>
> And þ survived in English right up till the advent of printing.  Abrigon
> unjustly blames the French for the loss of the letter in English; in fact
> it was the German fonts used by Chaucer & the early printers that hastened
> its demise.  The used {y} as a substitute for þ - hence the mock archaic
> "Ye
> olde tea shoppe", which was not satisfactory - and the Norman {th} won out.
I thought it was just an evolution of shape? I've seen photos of
hand-written texts with very y-looking Þ's. Generally with an extension
to the right-hand (I think) bit that went on the top, although sometimes
it was just a dot.

> > Problem with þ is it looks
> > a lot like "p", so that using it looks like "þornography" to use a
> > friend of mine's joke.  :-)
>
> In the old English version of the Latin alphabet, the symbol "wenn" also
> looked horribly like {p} and {þ}.   IMHO the Norman French W was an
> improvement.  But I agree þ and ð would be useful letters in English; but
> then so would symbols for /S/ and /Z/ be useful as well as the affricate
> /tS/ (we have {j} = /dZ/ already).
If we used <c> for /S/ and <j> for /Z/, then we could have <tc> and <dj>
for /tS/ and /dZ/ respectively, which seems fair enough to me. It's not
like you see anyone arguing we need a single letter for /au/ or /oi/.

> > Also, Macs show thorn as "fl" for some reason.
>
> Mine doesn't - your þ is perfectly legible as 'thorn' (I hope it stays
> the same when reposted).
Because your Mac knew it was dealing in ISO-8859-1. If it thought it was
dealing in MacRoman, it would've shown the fl-ligature. Just different
character sets. Same as the Japanese bloke who had '\' show as a
yen-symbol a while ago.

Tristan.

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