Thorn (letter)
Thorn, or þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in Old English and other languages.[1] The letter originated from the symbol ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark and was called thorn in Anglo-Saxon and the Scandinavian rune.[2] Thorn looks like the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are not related.[3] Icelandic is the only surviving language which uses the letter þ.[4]
Thorn is pronounced like the sound of th, as in the English word thick.[5] In some cases, it makes a sound similar to th as in the English word the.[6] Modern Icelandic usually represents this sound with the letter eth instead.[7]
The lowercase thorn character is unusual in that it has both an ascender (the tall part at the top of the character) and a descender (the part of the character below the line it is written on).[8]
References
[change | change source]- ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica, “Thorn (letter)”.
- ↑ R. I. Page, An Introduction to English Runes, Boydell Press.
- ↑ Omniglot, “Þorn”.
- ↑ Árni Böðvarsson, Íslensk málfræði, Mál og menning.
- ↑ Encyclopædia Britannica, “Thorn (letter)”.
- ↑ Omniglot, “Þorn”.
- ↑ Einar Haugen, The Scandinavian Languages, Harvard University Press.
- ↑ The Unicode Consortium, The Unicode Standard.