{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/1462", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 1462, "subject": "edh and thorn [Digest urth.v024.n024]", "messages": 2, "voices": 2, "first": "1999-03-31T09:14:46+00:00", "last": "1999-04-01T00:03:34+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "John Bishop", "address": "jbishop at blkbrd.zko.dec.com" }, "date": "1999-03-31T09:14:46+00:00", "subject": "(urth) Re: edh and thorn [Digest urth.v024.n024]", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "The confusion is understandable, as the history is messy.\n\nAt one point in the past English had both (as Icelandic does\nnow), but subsequently edh disappeared and thorn was used for\nboth voiced and voiceless forms. Since early print sets didn't\nhave thorns, people did another substitution, using \"y\" for thorn,\nas the two letters are somewhat similiar in shape and don't conflict\nmuch (few minimal pairs). Thus we get \"ye olde tea shoppe\" -- and\nof course, even later on, people read that with a \"y\" rather than a\nthorn and get even more confused.\n\n\n\nIt all starts with speakers of one of the ancestral Germanic\nlanguages using a varient of the alphabet in Northern Italy well\nbefore the Roman Era. They wrote on wood or scratched on stone,\nand changed the letter forms to suit the material: lots of \nverticals, no curves, horizontals become diagonals, etc.\nThis leads to the many runic alphabets. But the bottom line\nis \"D\" becomes thorn, which is nicely ironic.\n\nWhen English begins to be written in the Latin alphabet, thorn\nand another letter (used for some kind of spirant and later on\nreplaced by \"g\" or \"gh\") are borrowed to represent sounds in\nEnglish not well represented in the Latin alphabet. They are\ngradually replaced by Latin letters.\n\nI don't know the history of \"edh\", sorry.\n\n\n\nDragging this back to Wolfe by main force, I note that we have\nevidence that Severian's alphabet is like ours: at one point we\nare told that \"s\" looks like a snake and \"t\" like a cross. Are\nthere any other hints?\n\n\t-John Bishop, letting his long-ago linguistics degree\n take over for a minute or two." } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "William H. Ansley", "address": "wansley at warwick.net" }, "date": "1999-04-01T00:03:34+00:00", "subject": "Re: (urth) Re: edh and thorn [Digest urth.v024.n024]", "in_reply_to": "", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Dragging this back to Wolfe by main force, I note that we have\nevidence that Severian's alphabet is like ours: at one point we\nare told that \"s\" looks like a snake and \"t\" like a cross. Are\nthere any other hints?\n\n-John Bishop, letting his long-ago linguistics degree\n take over for a minute or two." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "This may not be reliable evidence of the letter shapes at all. Since Wolfe\n\"translated\" TBotNS from a strange future tongue he probably had to make an\nadjustment in this passage. For all we know the last two letters in the\nactual word Severian used (which Wolfe translated as 'last') looked\nentirely different. We could have had a hoop and a cup rather than a\nserpent and a sword, just to pick two more objects at random that can\nconceivably be thought to look like other letters in our alphabet. Which\nletters? I'll leave that as an exercise for you.\n\nWilliam Ansley" } ] } ] }