Descrição
Which letter isn’t used in English anymore? Over the course of many centuries, there have been a lot of different letters such as eth, yogh, and wynn which have fallen out of use. Or some like ash which have been making a resurgence… thank god they changed that. But today we’re going back to ye old times… cause I’m going to talk about thorn. Thorn derived from the old runic alphabet, futhark, and was used regularly throughout Old English, where it actually made a ‘TH’ sound. Thorn was so popular that even the word ‘that’ got its own abbreviation for a brief period, which was just thorn with a slash. And as such when you read signs using ‘ye’, it’s actually not how you would think of pronouncing it as it really just ‘the’. But now this makes no sense since the ‘Y’ sound and the ‘TH’ sound are completely different, so how did this happen? Blame the printing presses, which were coming out of Italy and Germany, and they were just like… “eh we don’t need this letter”, since by that time the letter pretty much evolved to just look like a ‘Y’. But I guess some places kept the ‘ye’ something, and thorn is actually still used in some languages such as Icelandic… yeah that’s pretty much it.
SOURCE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vskV7E0g0Q
https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2013/08/eth-thorn-and-ash-they-flunked-the-screen-test-for-our-alphabet/
https://grammarpartyblog.com/2011/07/26/ye-olde-mispronunciation-the-long-forgotten-letter-thorn/
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