Eth (Ð, ð), also spelt edh or eð, is a letter used in Old English (Anglo-Saxon); present-day Icelandic; the Faroese alphabet, in which it is called edd; and the orthography for Scandinavian Älvdalsmål. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a Roman D with a line partially through the vertical stroke. The lowercase resembles a curved Roman d with a line through the top.
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 like 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. It has also been labeled an "interdental fricative." [1] In Faroese, ð isn't assigned to any particular phoneme and appears mostly 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 [g]. 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 is introduced for etymological reasons.
In the orthography for Scandinavian Älvdalsmål, the ð represents a voiced dental fricative like 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 /ɛð/. (The IPA symbol for the voiceless dental fricative is θ.)
Computer encoding
- 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
Ðandð.
- On UNIX-like systems such as Linux it can be entered with the Compose key plus d and - or D and - for the uppercase version.
- Using Microsoft Windows, one can hold Alt while typing 0208 or 0240 on the numeric keypad to produce the uppercase and lowercase forms, respectively.
Miscellany
- The letter ð is sometimes used in mathematics and engineering textbooks as a symbol for a partial derivative, but the more usual symbol is ∂.
- The modern Greek letter delta (Δ, δ) has, in general, the same phonetic value, and ð is the only Latin alphabet letter faithfully representing delta's phonetic value.
- The symbol is mentioned in the Rush song By-Tor and the Snow Dog in the first verse:
Prince By-Tor takes the cavern to the North light,
The sign of Eth is rising in the air
External links
References
- Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan.