October 19, 2004

• What you have within the brackets is both the lower case and uppercase side-by-side. I'm familiar with it from taking a class in Icelandic literature, I have no idea what the malay connection is.
• it comes up vietnamese too. i have no idea as even if i did have translators on, i'd have no idea what any of it was. i think it might be a glyph problem, looking like some other character. thanks, i thought i might be two but knew NADA-- it's a nice symbol either way.
• It represents a soft "th" sound, maybe it's used in phonetic notation? I'm not really qualified to say, but that'd be my guess. Paging languagehat!
• I don't quite understand what you are asking.. eth is thorn, þ, just an alphabetical symbol used to designate the dental fricative sound 'th' such as in the english word 'thread'. Thorn doesn't have a symbol in in English because we use T+H to indicate this sound. Other languages, such as old Anglo Saxon, present Icelandic, and others you have noted use thorn in their alphabets. There's not necessarily any connection with these other than that the cultures behind adopted the sound as part of their language. The lower-case eth has a symbol in international phonetic alphabet to indicate the same sound. You need to talk to languagehat, and perhaps to be more specific in what you're asking? Sorry if I seem obtuse.
• no, this is great. calling all language hats! put your thinking caps on actually i was just looking for his freelancing? thread to post him some links on my own site as i can't on mefi. i'm just doing a little metaself exploration i'm a thorn heh
• someone schwa me and i'm almost set to explore alone
• ^
• All I can tell you is, that it's not in Malay. The Malay alphabet was only fairly recently Anglicised, and uses the usual 26 suspects. Only time I've seen it is in European languages, especially the older ones. Also what Nostril said.
• 'Tis Old Norse, Icelandic, and Faeroese, representing a voiceless interdental fricative (represented in English by "th").
• Đ is a character in Croatian. It's pronounced sort of "Dj" Đ is the eighth letter of the alphabet. The lower case is a "đ". Serbian uses the Cyrillic equivalent although it's the sixth letter in their alphabet.
• I like saying "interdental fricative." It makes my tongue dance. I'm going to have to work that into a conversation now.
• Ahem, 'eth' is not 'thorn'. These are two separate letters, representing the two sounds that modern English represents with the letters "TH". Eth is for the voiced sound as in "bother" and thorn is for the voiceless sound as in "both".
  Both of these letters are alive and well and in use in Iceland, and if I recall correctly, both were used in English spelling in the past. When we see "Ye olde" whatever, it's because of a typographic misunderstanding. The word "the" used to be spelled [thorn-e] and pronounced with voiceless th. Lower case thorn looks a lot like lower case y in some old styles.
  If you really want to get picky, the letter used in Vietnamese is not eth, but D with a bar. The capital letter looks the same, but small eth is curvy and small Vietnamese-letter-d-with-bar looks like, well, a small letter d with a bar. [on preview - like Croatian] See Omniglot for more than you ever wanted to know. Sorry for the verbosity, it's just my way.
• fabu the eth of you all a friend o' mine always said the key to a brooklyn accent was "to dentalize your speech" try saying dentalize with a brooklyn accent. it works *gives you the eth sign and watches for more*
• *gives you the eth sign and watches for more* So, is Ð just ß with a lisp?
• Sorry I'm late, but spectrusery said it all. *awards spectrusery honorary language headgear*
• actually i was just looking for his freelancing? thread to post him some links What a sweetheart! You could add a comment here or just drop me a line at languagehat AT yahoo DOT com.
• picture one happy newbie monkey wearing honorary headgear, trying very hard not to wee himself with excitement but instead offering bananas to all who pass. )))))))
  Too bad no one else in my life will understand the honor of a nod from languagehat h/self! I think I love this place.
• We use it in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
• đ is a completely different symbol from ð, though it tends to be used for similar sounds. In Saami for instance, it is used for the same voiced interdental fricative as exists in Icelandic, and english (otherwise pronounced like the th in the word this, in case no one gave an example). It looks like the use in croatian is completely different from the use in Icelandic and the IPA, however. Hopefully this wikipedia article will be of some use to you.
• hat: apparently some links are unlinkable so i must go by subversive means if any facts are great but i like this family feud survey says stuff too
• spectrusery: Wear it with pride! And you know, 1746 was a pretty interesting year: the Battle of Culloden was fought, Princeton was founded, and (closest to my heart) Sir William Jones, discoverer of the Indo-European language family, was born.
• As nickdanger said, this symbol is frequently used in IPA to indicate unvoiced "th" in any language. I use it as a singer when I mark IPA into my scores (I'm needlessly anal retentive that way), and my wife stares it in the face every day as a speech-language pathologist.
• I concede. I should have written "voiced", not "voiceless".
• do these threads close or an i come back and update for people who want to know?
• You can come back.
• Ah, sorry. The wikipedia link should have been this .