Eth
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Eth is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. It is often transliterated as d. The lowercase version has been adopted to represent a voiced dental fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
In Old English, ð (called Template:Lang by the Anglo-Saxons) was used interchangeably with þ to represent the Old English dental fricative phoneme Template:IPAslink or its allophone Template:IPAslink, which exist in modern English phonology as the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives now spelled "th".
Unlike the runic letter þ, ð is a modified Roman letter. ð was not found in the earliest records of Old English. A study of Mercian royal diplomas found that ð (along with đ) began to emerge in the early 8th century, with ð becoming strongly preferred by the 780s. Another source indicates that the letter is "derived from Irish writing".
The lowercase version has retained the curved shape of a medieval scribe's d, which d itself in general has not. ð was used throughout the Anglo-Saxon era but gradually fell out of use in Middle English, practically disappearing altogether by 1300; þ survived longer, ultimately being replaced by the digraph th.Template:Citation needed
[[File:Icelandic handwriting.JPG|thumb|alt=Photo of black handwritten text on a seemingly yellow paper with the top and bottom blurry and vertical middle clear|A sample of Icelandic handwriting with some instances of lowercase ð clearly visible: in the words Template:Lang, Template:Lang and Template:Lang. Also visible is a thorn in the word Template:Lang.]]
In Icelandic, ð represents a voiced dental fricative Template:IPA, which is the same as the th in English that, but it never appears as the first letter of a word, where þ is used in its stead. The name of the letter is pronounced in isolation (and before words beginning with a voiceless consonant) as Template:IPA and therefore with a voiceless rather than voiced fricative.
In Faroese, ð is not assigned to any particular phoneme and appears mostly for etymological reasons; however, it does show where most of the Faroese glides are; when ð appears before r, it is, in a few words, pronounced Template:IPA. In the Icelandic and Faroese alphabets, ð follows d.
In Olav Jakobsen Høyem's version of Template:Lang based on Template:Lang, ð was always silent and was introduced for etymological reasons.
Ð has also been used by some in written Welsh to represent Template:IPA, which is normally represented as dd.
Template:Unichar is used in phonetic transcription.
Template:Unichar is used in the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet.
See also
