• TabbsTheBat (they/them)@pawb.social
    55·
    4 个月前

    þ or thorn is an old letter used for one of the sounds now represented by th in english (the other being ð or eth) old german presses didn’t have a þ so it was replaced with y (ye olde), and later th, but because the 2 th sounds are confusing being the same letter cluster, so people started joking about bringing back þ and ð and it quickly became something trendy to use among some demographics

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    25·
    4 个月前

    There are two camps who are using the old letters. Those who think the letters and fun and different and maybe we lost something when we stopped using them.

    And then there are those who might be using them as a dog whistle of sorts. The darker side of the “we lost something” sentiment. Y’know; “Make English great again” but with exclusionism and jackboots. (See also: Anglish, which has the same problem.)

    I’d quite like to be one of the wacky bunch who uses those letters occasionally because they’re neat, but I don’t want to be mistaken for the other sort of person.

    There’s also a problem with old letters anyway. “The” was spelt with “þ”, not “ð” despite the latter having the correct sound, and so you’ll see people altering the spelling of “þe” to be “ðe”. This iz equivalent to spelling sertain other wordz with the wrong letterz. This annoys purists of all stripes, jackboots or otherwise. (Heck, I’m not even sure which is the right one for “other”. “th” covers all bases.)

    I mean, it’s almost worth it to annoy the fascists, but it’s probably best just to leave the old letters in the past.

    • orgrinrt@lemmy.world
      17·
      4 个月前

      On a relevant note, I hate the far-right assuming ownership of certain concepts and “themes” for a lack of a better word. Like the futhark, but just cool Scandinavian stuff in general. I’m a bit of a history buff especially for the roundabout period of the North-European Iron age, and I’d love to do manual handwork tattoos using the alphabets used back then, along with some of the symbols in both the Norse as well as Finnic tradition and mythology, but fuck if everyone wouldn’t assume me a nazi straight away if I did do that.

      I have an unreasonable amount of disappointment about this in my heart. I could just go and do what I want, then explain them to those important to me, but I am almost the polar opposite of a far-right shithead, on top of which I’m also a neurodivergent demisexual enby, so there’s an absolute zero amount of me wanting to be even slightly associated with those wanting to deny my existence even to total strangers on rare occasions. No way.

      But it’s like I can’t present myself as openly as I’d like because of that, and it kind of breaks my heart, even still, when I’m closing being middle aged…

      • Bimfred@lemmy.world
        3·
        4 个月前

        They get to claim it because we let them. Every time an article comes out with “____ is a Nazi dogwhistle,” there’s a set of people who don’t want to be associated with Nazis (or insert relevant disliked group of choice) who will immediately drop whatever the thing is. This creates a cycle where something does eventually become a dogwhistle, because everyone who didn’t use it as such has stopped using it altogether.

        TL;DR: Fuck 'em. Don’t let those assholes control how you express yourself.

    • teft@piefed.socialEnglish
      9·
      4 个月前

      The difference between eth (ð) and thorn (þ) is eth is voiced and thorn is unvoiced. Voiced means you move your vocal cords while saying the letter. Unvoiced means you don’t. The and other would both use ð for their “th” sound. Both would use þ for its “th” sound.

      Edit: a word

      • palordrolap@fedia.io
        4·
        4 个月前

        I admit it’s a bit of a straw man. I’m imagining that 1) there exist fascistic purists of the English language (some of the Anglish bunch are definitely like this), 2) they not only like the old letters but they’re using them as a dog whistle, and 3) they might be be annoyed by people getting their “pure” spellings wrong.

        Nonetheless, I prefer to avoid potential dog whistles if I can help it.

        (Semi-relatedly, I also think the runic alphabet is cool, but wouldn’t you know it, at least one of those symbols is used by white supremacists. We can’t have anything nice.)

    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
      3·
      4 个月前

      Oh, a “rune”, is it? Those old English were too stupid for “letters”? Sounds like someone’s epoch-ism is on full display.

      • Treczoks@lemmy.world
        7·
        4 个月前

        This glyph is so old, it comes from the times the Angles and Saxons actually used runes. The thorn was more edgy back then, too. Just think about why it is called thorn.

        Its nice round belly is just a modern interpretation.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
        7·
        4 个月前

        The preceding Runic thorn was ᚦ. While similar to the Latin character Þ/þ, it makes sense to classify one as a rune (since it fits with other runes, which all have constant height) and the other as a letter (since they exist as uppercase and lowercase).

        Similarly, the characters 칭 or 🐝 are not letters but a Hangul syllable and emoji, respectively.

        • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
          2·
          4 个月前

          Interesting! I always thought a letter was a thing that mapped to a sound. So obviously not Chinese characters. But the thorn as the th sound would qualify.

          • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.orgEnglish
            2·
            4 个月前

            Nope. Phonemes or their groups, most commonly represented by IPA characters, map to a sound. If you know anything about English spelling, you’ll know that letters and sounds don’t correspond in many cases.

            However, you are right that “letter” can be used for any segmental (phoneme-based) writing system, including runic (examples)

  • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
    14·
    4 个月前

    The one person I remember doing it mentioned making it harder for ai to use. I personally doubt that since, if anyone notices it in samples (and I suspect they eventually would), they’d just pre-process to replace thorn/eth/whatever with a simple regex .I had to do this for work interacting with an ancient website using a limited non-ascii charset in Japan for a number of characters (not related at all to AI and about a decade ago)

  • Nico198X@europe.pub
    6·
    4 个月前

    someone is trying to bring the thorn back. frankly, i don’t think it’s a letter worth saving…