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Why are people using the "þ" character?
(lemmy.zip)
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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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Honestly þis þread makes me sad. Can't a fella be a lil quirky in peace?
Many people in lemmy are wannabe reddit refugees it seems, so, "no".
All this hate for a little quirky difference!
You're supposed to grow out of hating people for being different when you're in school, and if you never reach that level of tolerance/maturity, join the Republican party.
There are people in this thread acting like homophobic boomers freaking out over boys having long hair: "I'VE TOLD YOU IT'S WRONG AND YET YOU PERSIST. YOU'RE JUST TRYING TO MAKE ME ANGRY. WHY DO YOU INSIST ON MAKING ME ANGRY?" Er, we were just having fun.
Oh, so like, "your honour, she wanted it because she was Dressed Like That"... Wow, that's actually so sad. Cultural quality in lemmy truly has degraded.
You'll have to make your point more explicitly, I'm afraid.
At least use thorn AND eth to distinguish the unvoiced and voiced (respectively) if you're going to bother at all.
Unvoiced and voiced? Which of my uses is which here?
It "should" be:
You can make the þ sound by itself without using your voice. It just sounds like air coming out of a tire. You can't make the ð sound without also making a vowel sound.
Ðough historically the þorn was often used for boþ as well, and it's definitely tricky for modern Eŋlish speakers to distiŋuish.
Voiced is like the th in the, unvoiced is like the th in thin.
Unvoiced sounds the same whispered, whereas voiced loses its buzz when you whisper.
Voiced (eth):
this that then with the then breathe bother those though
Unvoiced (thorn):
thread thin thanks width breath both youth pithy smith thatch thought throughout thorough
Interestingly, Icelandic and Old English used thorn for the voiced one too, but with the introduction of eth, that usage dropped out of Icelandic and with the introduction of the printing press, y got substituted for thorn in English, resulting in "ye" for the, which was never pronounced "yee", always "the".
Arguably, the printing press came at exactly the wrong time for English, which was at a time of language change and inconsistency, and we got stuck with some very inconsistent spelling. For example, the letter cluster (grapheme) ough represents different sounds (phonemes) in though (oh) thought (or) throughout (oo, ow) thorough (uh), partly because the Old English/Lowland Scots sound gh was on its way out. In Lowland Scots (much closer to Old English than Modern English), night is pronounced similarly to the German word nicht, but gh is voiced when ch is unvoiced.
Thats really cool thank you
Why is it that the Dutch press operators that Caxton hired to run his printing presses, seldom catch any blame for the spelling changes they made to English? The one I always remember is Ghost. Those Dutch press operators decided that Gost should look more like the the Dutch word Gheest. So Ghost got it's "h". As did ghoul because you wouldn't that to be too different......And other words got the same treatments. Thankfully many of the changes didn't stick but enough have.
If only the printing press hadn't been introduced to English until after the Great Vowel Shift was over, spelling and spoken would be much closer aligned.
The explanation I heard was that "ghost" stuck around because "Holy Ghost" was in the printed bibles and people didn't question that authority.
I believe first is voiced, second isn't. IIRC rule of thumb is voiced makes a D, unvoiced makes a T, so, "dis tread".
Voiced is the buzzy Th. Unvoiced is the hissy Th.
To tell which sounds are voiced or voiceless, put a finger or two on your larynx and look for the vibration. /th/ as in "thread" is voiceless - no vibration - whereas /th/ in "the" is voiced - vibration