[Sca-cooks] eths and thorns, oh my

[Laura C. Minnick]

What I remember from a year of Anglo-Saxon- (and my books are all in
another town, natch.)...

The difference between hard 'th' and soft 'th'-

These are fricatives- and they are hard (voiced) or soft (unvoiced).
Voiced is like this or there or then- say them and you can hear the
'voice'. Unvoiced is usually at the end of the word rather than at the
beginning- health, wealth, with, etc. There is still air passing between
your teeth and tongue, but no 'voice' in the throat.

Now, as far as the uses of the different characters (and no, I don't
have my keyboard set up for them- I have a hard enough time typing with
modern letters!)...

The thorn and the eth are virtually interchangable in my experience, at
least in a textual basis. The thorn (the one that looks like a squished
Y) tend to appear in texts long after the eth (the D with the line
through or the d with the slash through the stem) fades out of
manuscripts. I don't remember seeing the eth in a text much after
1000-1050 or so. But the thorn continues through Middle English texts
and on until Early Modern. As far as usage in the Old English texts, is
seems to depend on where the text is produced (local practice and custom
tends to be a significant variable in calligraphy, and a nice this for
us- clues is in as to where a text was produced) and who the scribe was
and if he'd had his wheaties. I seem to remember that use of the eth was
more frequent in the morth but I might be misremembering that.

Hope this was useful,

'Lainie