Thorn (letter)

Not to be confused with the rune of the same name, from which it is derived, the Latin letter P, or ϸ, the Graeco-Bactrian letter Sho.

Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Futhark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. The only language in which þ is currently in use is Icelandic.

Þ
Þ þ
Usage
Writing system	Adapted from Futhark and Futhorc into Latin script
Type	Alphabetic and logographic
Language of origin	Old English language Old Norse language
Sound values	[θ] [ð] [θ̠] [z] /θɔːrn/
In Unicode	U 00DE, U 00FE
History
Development	ᚦ Þ þ
Time period	~800 to present
Descendants	ꝥ
Sisters	None
Transliterations	Θ, th
Other
Associated graphs	th, dh
Writing direction	Left-to-right

It is pronounced as either a voiceless dental fricative [θ] or its voiced counterpart [ð]. However, in modern Icelandic it is pronounced as a laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative [θ̠], similar to th as in the English word thick, or a (usually apical) voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative [ð̠], similar to th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth ⟨Ð, ð⟩; however, [ð̠] may occur as an allophone of /θ̠/, and written ⟨þ⟩, when it appears in an unstressed pronoun or adverb after a voiced sound.

In typography the lowercase thorn character is unusual in that it has both an ascender and a descender.

Uses

English

Old English

The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, as was ð, called eth. Unlike eth, thorn remained in common use through most of the Middle English period. Both letters were used for the phoneme /θ/, sometimes by the same scribe. This sound was regularly realised in Old English as the voiced fricative [ð] between voiced sounds, but either letter could be used to write it; the modern use of [ð] in phonetic alphabets is not the same as the Old English orthographic use. A thorn with the ascender crossed (Ꝥ) was a popular abbreviation for the word that.

Middle and Early Modern English

"... hir the grace that god put ..." (Extract from The Boke of Margery Kempe)

The modern digraph th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century; at the same time, the shape of ⟨Þ⟩ grew less distinctive, with the letter losing its ascender (becoming similar in appearance to the old wynn (⟨Ƿ⟩, ⟨ƿ⟩), which had fallen out of use by 1300, and to ancient through modern ⟨P⟩, ⟨p⟩). By this stage, th was predominant and the use of ⟨Þ⟩ was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. This was the longest-lived use, though with the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of ⟨y⟩ for ⟨Þ⟩ became ubiquitous, leading to the common "ye", as in 'Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. One major reason for this was that ⟨Y⟩ existed in the printer's types that were imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while ⟨Þ⟩ did not. The word was never pronounced as /j/, as in ⟨yes⟩, though, even when so written. The first printing of the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 used y^e for "the" in places such as Job 1:9, John 15:1, and Romans 15:29. It also used y^t as an abbreviation for "that", in places such as 2 Corinthians 13:7. All were replaced in later printings by the or that, respectively.

Abbreviations

Abbreviations of "the"

Middle English þ with superscript e

Blackletter y with superscript e

The following were scribal abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:

• (þͤ) – a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
• (þͭ) – a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
• (þͧ) – a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou (which was written early on as þu or þou)

In later printed texts, given the lack of a sort for the glyph, printers substituted the (visually similar) letter y for the thorn:

•    yᷤ – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word this
• (yͤ) – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
• (yͭ) – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that

Modern English

Thorn in the form of a "Y" survives in pseudo-archaic uses, particularly the stock prefix "ye olde". The definite article spelt with "Y" for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced /jiː/ ("yee") or mistaken for the archaic nominative case of the second person plural pronoun, "ye", as in "hear ye!".

Icelandic

Icelandic is the only living language to keep the letter thorn (in Icelandic; þ, pronounced þoddn, [θ̠ɔtn̥] or þorn [θ̠ɔrn̥]). The letter is the 30th in the Icelandic alphabet, modelled after Old Norse alphabet in the 19th century; it is transliterated to th when it cannot be reproduced and never appears at the end of a word. For example, the name of Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson is anglicised as Hafthor.

Its pronunciation has not varied much, but before the introduction of the eth character, þ was used to represent the sound [ð], as in the word "verþa", which is now spelt verða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic or normalized orthography. Þ was originally taken from the runic alphabet and is described in the First Grammatical Treatise from the 12th-century:

Staf þann er flestir menn kalla þ, þann kalla ég af því heldur þe að þá er það atkvæði hans í hverju máli sem eftir lifir nafnsins er úr er tekinn raddarstafur úr nafni hans, sem alla hefi ég samhljóðendur samda í það mark nú sem ég reit snemma í þeirra umræðu. [...] Höfuðstaf þe-sins rita ég hvergi nema í vers upphafi því að hans atkvæði má eigi æxla þótt hann standi eftir raddarstaf í samstöfun. – First Grammarian, First Grammatical Treatise

The letter which most men call thorn I shall call the, so that its sound value in each context will be what is left of the name when the vowel is removed, since I have now arranged all the consonants in that manner, as I wrote earlier in this discussion. [...] The capital letter of the I do not write except at the beginning of a section, since its sound cannot be extended, even when it follows the vowel of the syllable. – First Grammarian, First Grammatical Treatise, translation by Einar Haugen

Upper- and lowercase versions of the thorn character, in sans-serif (left) and serif (right)

Computing codes

See also: Unicode input and Alt codes

Upper and lower case forms of thorn have Unicode encodings:

• U 00DE Þ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN (Þ)
• U 00FE þ LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN (þ)

These Unicode codepoints were inherited from ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin-1") encoding.

Variants

See also: Medieval Unicode Font Initiative

Various forms of thorn were used for medieval scribal abbreviations:

• U A764 Ꝥ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE
• U A765 ꝥ LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE
• U A766 Ꝧ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER
• U A767 ꝧ LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN WITH STROKE THROUGH DESCENDER
• U A7D2 ꟒ <reserved-A7D2>
• U A7D3 ꟓ LATIN SMALL LETTER DOUBLE THORN was used in the Middle English Ormulum

See also

• Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩
• Sho (letter), Ϸ, a similar letter in the Greek alphabet used to write the Bactrian language
• Yogh, Ȝ, a letter used in Middle English and Older Scots
• Wynn, Ƿ, another runic letter used in Old English
• Eth, Ð, another Old English and Icelandic letter

Bibliography

• Freeborn, Dennis (1992) From Old English to Standard English. London: Macmillan
• Ladefoged, Peter; Maddieson, Ian (1996). The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-19815-6.
• Pétursson, Magnus (1971), "Étude de la réalisation des consonnes islandaises þ, ð, s, dans la prononciation d'un sujet islandais à partir de la radiocinématographie", Phonetica, 33 (4): 203–216, doi:10.1159/000259344, S2CID 145316121