Þ
Þ or þ (spoken: [θɔrn] , Thorn ; Icelandic [θ̠ɔrtn̥] , þordn in common parlance) is a letter in the alphabets of Old English and the Old Norse, as well as in today's Icelandic alphabet . Also in the Latin transcription of the Gothic language it is mostly used instead of the “th”, since it was also represented by a single letter in the Gothic alphabet . The letter originated from the rune Thurisaz .
The exact sound value varies depending on the writing system. In Icelandic, “Þ” only stands for a voiceless dental fricative , like today's English “th” in bath [... θ] . In Old English, on the other hand, it stood next to “ Ð ” for both [θ] and for the voiced dental fricative [ð] .
In English , the thorn was increasingly replaced by the digraph "th" from the 14th century ; at the same time, the shape of the letter came closer and closer to that of the letter " Y ". As a result, "Y" (e.g. in the printing industry) was used as a substitute - the documents imported from continental Europe did not contain a Thorn. For this reason, abbreviations with Y instead of Thorn are found in early printed products, e.g. y e for the , y t for that . This is still reflected today in old or pseudo-historical names, for example “ye olde” (pronounced “the old”) for many restaurants (see example on the right).
Examples
The Norse god Thor is written Þór in Icelandic . In the elections to the Icelandic parliament Althing was P the party letter of the Icelandic pirate party Píratar .
Representation on computer systems
| System 1 |
Majuskel (Þ) LATIN CAPITAL LETTER THORN |
Minuscule (þ) LATIN SMALL LETTER THORN |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Windows | CP 850 ( TUI ) | Alt+ 2322 | Alt+ 2312 |
| CP 1252 ( GUI ) | Alt+ 02222 | Alt+ 02542 | |
| Apple Macintosh | - | - | |
|
Linux (with newer versions of the X Window System ) |
Alt Gr+ ⇧Shift+ Por |
Alt Gr+ Por Compose, T,H |
|
| Neo | Mod3+ ↹, ⇧Shift+ TH3 | Mod3+ ↹, T, H3 | |
| Apache OpenOffice variants | - | - | |
| Microsoft Word | Keyboard shortcut | - | - |
| Unicode input | D, E, Alt+C | F, E, Alt+C | |
| Vim | Digraph 4 | Strg+ K, ⇧Shift+TH | Strg+ K, t,h |
| Unicode input | Strg+ V, U, 0, 0, D,E | Strg+ V, U, 0, 0, F,E | |
| Character encoding | |||
| Unicode | U + 00DE | U + 00FE | |
| UTF-8 | C3 hex 9E hex | C3 hex BE hex | |
| ISO 8859-1 | DE hex | FE hex | |
| HTML entity | & THORN; | & thorn; | |
| XML / XHTML | decimal | & # 222; | & # 254; |
| hexadecimal | & # x00DE; | & # x00FE; | |
| TeX / LaTeX | Text mode | \ TH | \ th |
| Mathem. mode | - | - | |
