|
| |
Eth
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) 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 Elfdalian, the ð represents a voiced dental fricative
like th in English "them", and it follows d in the 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[citation needed]; þ survived longer, ultimately being
replaced by the modern digraph th by about 1500.
The ð is also used by some in written Welsh to represent the letter 'dd' (the
voiced dental fricative).
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 Ð and ð.
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 when using ISO8859-based locales or
Compose key plus d and h or D and h for uppercase version when using UTF-8-based
locales.
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
| |
|
