thorn

 

sharp-pointed projection on some plants, usually protective in function. Botanically, thorns are distinguished as modified stems (as in the honey locust and hawthorn) from spines, which are modified leaves (as in the barberry), and from prickles, which are epidermal outgrowths of the bark (as in the rose and blackberry). Cacti have both thorns and spines.

Thorn, or þorn (Þ, þ), is a letter in the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic alphabets. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with th. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs ("giant") in the Scandinavian rune poems, its reconstructed Proto-Germanic name being *Thurisaz.

It has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative, like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative, like th as in the English word the. In Modern Icelandic the usage is restricted to the former. The voiced form is represented with the letter eth (Ð, ð), though eth can be unvoiced, depending on position within a sentence, in which case its IPA representation is given as θ (theta).

In its typography, the thorn is one of the few characters in the alphabets derived from the Latin where the modern lower case form has greater height than the capital.

English usage

Old English

The letter thorn was used for writing Old English very early on, like ð; unlike ð, it remained in common usage through most of the Middle English period. A thorn with the ascender crossed ( ) was a popular abbreviation for the word that.

Middle and Early Modern English

The modern digraph th began to grow in popularity during the 14th century; at the same time, the shape of thorn 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, in some hands, such as that of the scribe of the unique mid-15th century manuscript of The Boke of Margery Kempe, ultimately becoming indistinguishable from the letter Y. By this stage th was predominant, however, and the usage of thorn was largely restricted to certain common words and abbreviations. In William Caxton's pioneering printed English, it is rare except in an abbreviated the, written with a thorn and a superscript E. This was the longest-lived usage, though the substitution of Y for thorn soon became ubiquitous. One major reason for this is that Y existed in the printer's type fonts that were imported from Germany or Italy, and Thorn did not. The first printing of the King James Version of the Bible in 1611 used the Y form of thorn with a superscript E in places such as Job 1:9, John 15:1, and Romans 15:29. It also used a similar form with a superscript T, which was an abbreviated that, in places such as 2 Corinthians 13:7. All were replaced in later printings by the or that, respectively.

Abbreviations

The following were abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn:

• – a Middle English abbreviation for the word the
• – a Middle English abbreviation for the word that
• – a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou (which was written early on as þu or þou)
• – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word the
• – an Early Modern English abbreviation for the word that

Modern English

Thorn in the form of a Y survives to this day in pseudo-archaic usages, particularly the stock prefix Ye olde. The definite article spelled with Y for thorn is often jocularly or mistakenly pronounced /ji/ or mistaken for the archaic nominative case of you, written ye. It is used infrequently in some modern English word games to replace the th with a single letter.

On computers

Þ and þ are part of Unicode and can be found at U+00DE and U+00FE respectively. The character can be typed directly from a standard Icelandic keyboard or via CTRL from Canadian Multilingual Standard but is not found on most keyboard layouts.

Different operating systems and window managers allow users to access the character in different ways. Almost all have some form of character map utility that allows users to copy and paste the character into a text. Word processing software such as Open Office Writer or Microsoft Word have similar utilities. Also, users often can switch keyboard layouts, customise an existing keyboard layout, or enter the letter directly using a character code. Advice on accessing the character on specific operating systems can be found in many places on the Internet (e.g. for X Window: [1]).

Popular culture

• The thorn rune is used as a symbol of evil in some films in the Halloween series.
• Thorn is sometimes used as part of the emoticon :-þ (or :Þ, :þ, :-Þ), representing a face with a tongue sticking out. Another emoticon, depicting a man in a hat is (-:þ.

See Also

• Pronunciation of English th

External links

• Michael Everson's essay On the status of the Latin letter þorn and of its sorting order
• Oxford Dictionary's FAQ: Why is 'ye' used instead of 'the' in antique English?
• Thorn and Eth: How to get them right

References

• Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan.

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters

Donate to Wikimedia