My great grandma was alive when scientists discovered the 26th letter of the alphabet. It took years for people to accept it.
My great grandma was alive when scientists discovered the 26th letter of the alphabet. It took years for people to accept it.
Wasn’t that a misconception and they both make either of those sounds?
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⟩.
Did Old English not have both voiced and voiceless dental fricatives? Modern German has neither θ nor ð, and Old English sharing so much it wouldn’t surprise me, but O.E. obviously acquired or inherited them somewhere - was the voiced distinction introduced later? Probably not from Latin, since it didn’t have those either.
Sorry, I forgot to put the last paragraph as a quote.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth#Old_English
~~https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwvbNppHZkg~~
Dang, the creator put a paywall on it.
It’s the same with the letter f, from what I remember it was pronounced as an f or a v, depending on what letters are before and after it, similar to lenition in Irish, or s being pronounced as both s and z in Romance languages depending on what’s around it.
Here we go
https://oldenglish.info/advpronunciationguide.html
Specifically þ and ð:
https://oldenglish.info/oestart.html
I don’t know, that’s a level deeper than I know about, but you could be right.
See my post to the reply above yours :)