Eth (/ɛð/ edh, uppercase: Ð, lowercase: ð; also spelled edhoreð), known as ðæt in Old English,[1] is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian.
| Ð | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ð ð | |||||||
 | |||||||
| Usage | |||||||
| Writing system | Latin script | ||||||
| Type | Alphabetic and logographic | ||||||
| Language of origin | Old English Old Norse | ||||||
| Sound values | [ð] [θ] [ð̠] /ˈɛð/ | ||||||
| In Unicode | U+00D0, U+00F0 | ||||||
| History | |||||||
| Development |
| ||||||
| Time period | ~800 to present | ||||||
| Sisters | None | ||||||
| Transliterations | d | ||||||
| Other | |||||||
| Associated graphs | th, dh | ||||||
| Writing direction | Left-to-Right | ||||||
| This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |||||||
⟨ ⟩, | |, / /, and [ ] are used here, see this page.
It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with ⟨dh⟩, and later ⟨d⟩.
It is often transliteratedas⟨d⟩.
The lowercase version has been adopted to represent a voiced dental fricative in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
InFaroese, ⟨ð⟩ is not assigned to any particular phoneme and appears mostly for etymological reasons, but it indicates most glides. When ⟨ð⟩ appears before ⟨r⟩, it is in a few words pronounced [ɡ]. In the Faroese alphabet, ⟨ð⟩ follows ⟨d⟩.
⟨Ð⟩ is sometimes used in Khmer romanization to represent ឍ thô.
In Icelandic, ⟨ð⟩, called "eð", represents an alveolar non-sibilant fricative, voiced [ð̠] intervocalically and word-finally, and voiceless [θ̠] otherwise, which form one phoneme, /θ/. Generally, /θ/ is represented by thorn ⟨Þ⟩ at the beginning of words and by ⟨ð⟩ elsewhere. The ⟨ð⟩ in the name of the letter is devoiced in the nominative and accusative cases: [ɛθ̠]. In the Icelandic alphabet, ⟨ð⟩ follows ⟨d⟩.
InOlav Jakobsen Høyem's version of Nynorsk based on Trøndersk, ⟨ð⟩ was always silent, and was introduced for etymological reasons.
In Old English, ⟨ð⟩ (called ðæt) was used interchangeably with ⟨þ⟩ to represent the Old English dental fricative phoneme /θ/ or its allophone /ð/, which exist in modern English phonology as the voiceless and voiced dental fricatives both now spelled ⟨th⟩.
Unlike the runic letter ⟨þ⟩, ⟨ð⟩ is a modified Roman letter. Neither ⟨ð⟩ nor ⟨þ⟩ was 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.[2] Another source indicates that the letter is "derived from Irish writing".[3]
Under the reign of King Alfred the Great, ⟨þ⟩ grew greatly in popularity and started to overtake ⟨ð⟩, and completely overtook it by Middle English. However, ⟨þ⟩ in turn died out by Early Modern English, mostly due to the rise of the printing press,[4] and was replaced by the digraph th.
⟨Ð⟩ has also been used by some in written Welsh to represent /ð/, which is normally represented as dd.[5]
Upper and lower case forms of eth have Unicode encodings:
These Unicode codepoints were inherited from ISO/IEC 8859-1 ("ISO Latin-1") encoding.
The types used by Caxton and his contemporaries originated in Holland and Belgium, and did not provide for the continuing use of elements of the Old English alphabet such as thorn <þ>, eth <ð>, and yogh <ʒ>. The substitution of visually similar typographic forms has led to some anomalies which persist to this day in the reprinting of archaic texts and the spelling of regional words. The widely misunderstood 'ye' occurs through a habit of printer's usage that originates in Caxton's time, when printers would substitute the <y> (often accompanied by a superscript <e>) in place of the thorn <þ> or the eth <ð>, both of which were used to denote both the voiced and non-voiced sounds, /ð/ and /θ/ (Anderson, D. (1969) The Art of Written Forms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, p 169)
