Eth
Eth (Ð, ð), also spelt
edh or
eð, is a
letter used in
Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and present-day
Icelandic, and in
Faroese alphabet in which it is called the letter
edd, and in
Älvdalen Dalecarlian. It was also used in
medieval Scandinavia, but was subsequently replaced with
dh and later
d.
The letter originated in Irish writing (Freeborn 1992, 24), and originated as a
d with a cross-stroke added. The lowercase version has retained the curved shape of a
medieval scribe's
d, which
d itself in general has not (but see for instance the
Audi logo).
In Icelandic,
ð represents a
voiced dental fricative, as in
th in English "them"; however, the name of the letter is pronounced
eþ, i.e.,
voiceless, unless followed by a vowel: it is never the first letter of a word. In Faroese,
ð isn't assigned to any particular phoneme but is mostly there for etymological reasons, however, it does show where most of the Faroese glides are, and when the
ð is before
r it is in a few words pronounced as . In the Icelandic and Faroese
alphabets,
ð follows
d.
In
Olav Jakobsen Høyem's version of
Nynorsk based on
Trøndersk, the
ð is always silent and introduced for etymological reasons.
In the Älvdalen Dalecarlian orthography, the
ð represents a voiced dental
fricative, as in
th in English "them", and it follows
d in their alphabet.
In
Old English,
ð was used interchangeably with
þ (thorn) to represent either voiced or voiceless dental fricatives. The letter
ð was used throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, but gradually fell out of use in
Middle English, disappearing altogether by about 1300;
þ survived longer, ultimately being replaced by the modern digraph
th by about 1500.
Lower-case eth is used as a symbol in the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), again for a
voiced dental fricative, and in IPA usage, the name of the symbol is pronounced with the same voiced sound, as .
In the
Unicode universal character encoding standard, upper and lower case eth are represented by U+00D0 and U+00F0, respectively. These code points are inherited from the older
ISO 8859-1 standard. In
HTML, eth is represented by the Latin character entities
Ð and
ð.
* The letter
ð is sometimes used in
mathematical and
engineering textbooks as a symbol for a
partial derivative, but the more usual symbol is ∂.
* The modern
Greek letter
delta (
",
δ) has, in general, the same phonetic value, and
ð is the only actual
Latin alphabet letter faithfully representing delta's phonetic value.
*
How to make the Eth*
Förslag till en enhetlig stavning för älvdalska (March, 2005)References
* Freeborn, Dennis (1992).
From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan.
