Thorn (letter)

The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, as was ð, also 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.

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). In some hands, such as that of the scribe of the unique mid-15th-century manuscript of The Boke of Margery Kempe, it ultimately became indistinguishable from the letter Y. By this stage, th was predominant and the use of Þ was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In William Caxton's pioneering printed English, it is rare except in an abbreviation for "the", written as þ^e. This was the longest-lived use, though the substitution of Y for Þ soon 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 type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, while Þ did not.[4] The word was never pronounced with a "y" sound, though, even when so written.[5] 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.

The following were 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)
• (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

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!". In fact, the y in the pronoun would have been spelled with a yogh, ȝe, rather than a y.

Icelandic is the only living language to retain the letter thorn (in Icelandic; þ, pronounced þoddn, [θ̠ɔtn̥] or þordn [θ̠ɔrtn̥]). 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[6] 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 spelt verða (meaning "to become") in modern Icelandic or normalized orthography.[7] Þ was originally taken from the runic alphabet and is described in the First Grammatical Treatise from the 12th-century:

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