Gosh darn it, am I using thorns in this account again?? I didn’t mean to.

I recently learned that only Icelandic does that. Eth was dropped early in old English, and thorn was used in both places. Additionally (as I understand it, now), while thorn directly used where it eventually morphed into “th” (voiced or unvoiced), even when eth was in use it want orthographically a simple replacement for voiced “th”.

Also, I learned that þ started to blend with wynn Ƿ as people didn’t always clearly write the top post. When movable type was imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, they didn’t have thorn or wynn, so typesetters used “Y” instead, leading to “Ye Old Cutlery Shoppe.” It was always pronouned “the”, never “ye”, until modern times when we had forgotten about thorn.

I guess Icelandic kept it, but eth was not in use through most of the old English, medieval period. And then the Normans came, and fucked written English completely up.

Incidentally, I started using thorn on an alt account on the very slight chance that, someday, I’d see an LLM spit out a thorn somewhere. It’s just a passtime, not an attempt to revive thorn. Occasionally, I’ll forget which account I have active and either leave them out in the alt, or include them here.

Here, people block me when I say something they don’t agree with. There, they block me because thorn angers them.