It might be specific to Lemmy, as I’ve only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can’t possibly be easier than just writing “th”? And in many comments I see “th” and “þ” being used interchangeably.
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Like the one guy or is it more than one? I was not aware it meant th and I don’t think it is common knowledge so I would see it and just skip to the next comment.
I thought it was an encoding bug, lol
I think it’s just that one guy and it’s kind of their whole thing.
Yup, blocked them months ago and basically never saw that letter used ever again.
same
I vote we start using it þadly on þurþose þecause it could þe þretty versatile and make english even more þointlessly confusing.
Yes, þravo!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Futhark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. The only language in which þ is currently in use is Icelandic.[1]
That’s great except for the fact that it doesn’t answer the question and also in a way calls the person asking a liar.
Because they’re pretentious twats who can’t even use it correctly.
On PieFed, that character is automatically converted to ‘th’.
That’s savage.
😄
I thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.
Geez
Huh, I’ve never seen it
Interesting what’s written here, I actually saw it more often in some Discord server. As far as I know, there it is just for fun and/or homestuck nostalgia, without any deeper meaning behind it.
Just like calling X “twitter” or “the hellsite”, or annotating everything with parenthesis, or using or refusing to use emoji, there does not need to be more of a reason to do something with written language than “I like it that way”. How much stylisation you can inject into your writing before you stop being comprehensible is another question.
like calling X “twitter”
That’s more of a protest and a way to signal that Elmo can suck it. I’ve also seen people use it to signal trans rights by dead-naming the site of the man who keeps dead-naming his trans daughter, Vivian Wilson, who is absolutely rad, btw.
I thought Tumblr was the hellsite
Damn Twitter really DOES steal everything from there…
It’s just that one guy i think
Yep
Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way ‽
Honestly þis þread makes me sad. Can’t a fella be a lil quirky in peace?
All this hate for a little quirky difference!
You’re supposed to grow out of hating people for being different when you’re in school, and if you never reach that level of tolerance/maturity, join the Republican party.
There are people in this thread acting like homophobic boomers freaking out over boys having long hair: “I’VE TOLD YOU IT’S WRONG AND YET YOU PERSIST. YOU’RE JUST TRYING TO MAKE ME ANGRY. WHY DO YOU INSIST ON MAKING ME ANGRY?” Er, we were just having fun.
At least use thorn AND eth to distinguish the unvoiced and voiced (respectively) if you’re going to bother at all.
Unvoiced and voiced? Which of my uses is which here?
It “should” be:
Honestly ðis þread makes me sad. Can’t a fella be a li’l quirky in peace?
You can make the þ sound by itself without using your voice. It just sounds like air coming out of a tire. You can’t make the ð sound without also making a vowel sound.
Ðough historically the þorn was often used for boþ as well, and it’s definitely tricky for modern Eŋlish speakers to distiŋuish.
Voiced is like the th in the, unvoiced is like the th in thin.
Unvoiced sounds the same whispered, whereas voiced loses its buzz when you whisper.
Voiced (eth):
this that then with the then breathe bother those thoughUnvoiced (thorn):
thread thin thanks width breath both youth pithy smith thatch thought throughout thoroughInterestingly, Icelandic and Old English used thorn for the voiced one too, but with the introduction of eth, that usage dropped out of Icelandic and with the introduction of the printing press, y got substituted for thorn in English, resulting in “ye” for the, which was never pronounced “yee”, always “the”.
Arguably, the printing press came at exactly the wrong time for English, which was at a time of language change and inconsistency, and we got stuck with some very inconsistent spelling. For example, the letter cluster (grapheme) ough represents different sounds (phonemes) in though (oh) thought (or) throughout (oo, ow) thorough (uh), partly because the Old English/Lowland Scots sound gh was on its way out. In Lowland Scots (much closer to Old English than Modern English), night is pronounced similarly to the German word nicht, but gh is voiced when ch is unvoiced.
Thats really cool thank you
How can I subscribe for more language nuance explanations?
https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ (Not me, but I enjoyed it a great deal, one of my favourite podcasts ever.)
Why is it that the Dutch press operators that Caxton hired to run his printing presses, seldom catch any blame for the spelling changes they made to English? The one I always remember is Ghost. Those Dutch press operators decided that Gost should look more like the the Dutch word Gheest. So Ghost got it’s “h”. As did ghoul because you wouldn’t that to be too different…And other words got the same treatments. Thankfully many of the changes didn’t stick but enough have.
If only the printing press hadn’t been introduced to English until after the Great Vowel Shift was over, spelling and spoken would be much closer aligned.
The explanation I heard was that “ghost” stuck around because “Holy Ghost” was in the printed bibles and people didn’t question that authority.
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To tell which sounds are voiced or voiceless, put a finger or two on your larynx and look for the vibration. /th/ as in “thread” is voiceless - no vibration - whereas /th/ in “the” is voiced - vibration
I believe first is voiced, second isn’t. IIRC rule of thumb is voiced makes a D, unvoiced makes a T, so, “dis tread”.
Voiced is the buzzy Th. Unvoiced is the hissy Th.
I don’t know, but I downvote every improper use of the thorn.
What is an improper use?
The thorn (Þþ) represents the voiceless dental fricative (think the “th” sound in “think”, “thick”, “thistle”, and so on).
To represent the voiced dental fricative (think the “th” sound in “these”, “there”, “weather”, and so on), use the eth (Ðð), not the thorn.
The improper use here would be to confuse the two.
In modern Icelandic, yes, and that’s certainly more pleasing, but historically thorn was also used for the voiced phoneme, and with the advent of printing press (which didn’t get imported with a thorn), it got written y, which is how you got “ye olde”.
Yes, but people also don’t generally speak today like they did back then, either.
They were used interchangeably in Beowolf, for example.
See this answer with plenty of authoritative references:
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/31881
It’s just one idiot trying to get attention.
I don’t like calling them an iditot just because of that but I have to admit I find this incredibly annoying.
OP is probably their alt, even.
Damn, anchors aweigh on this conspiracy, let’s do it.
Im an idiot, where’s my attention?
How do you not have all the attention with a shiny glittery butt?
Maybe they need those booty shorts on the other thread instead of conservative trunks
What’s really funny is I’m like super tall and quite a pair of regular ass trunks while Ubering one day and people were asking me about my super short athletic shorts. Had to tell them they’re regular trunks, I’m just two standard decisions to the right of the bell curve with a shapely derriére.
One would think a SparkleBooty wouldn’t have trouble attracting attention
you can also try making a nick with those giant blue bubble letters
Hey. That’s my thing. Get your own gimmick!
nice work it looks great
I saw someone else with them and legit thought this.
Come up with a dumb and/or ridiculous gimmick and you’ll get plenty!
Idiot is a very strong word to describe this. For a place so typically welcoming of neurodivergence this feels really dissonant in the grand scheme of things.
I get major ick vibes from this particular take on the situation.
Actually using the thorn isn’t so much the problem. It’s the misinformation. He constantly spreads in the b******* along with it.
If he was just doing it to do it, I don’t think anyone would really care.
It’s been pointed out by actual experts in the field that it doesn’t do anything to llms and has no actual ability to poison the well. At this point. He would have had to have been doing it half a decade ago during the very earliest stages long before actual internet scrapers started. Which basically makes the whole exercise pointless.
So if you want to use a thorn use a thorn but just use it to use it. Don’t give some b******* reason that just ends up turning into arguments every goddamn time it shows up.
So if you want to use a word use a word but just use it. Don’t give some bullshit filtering with *’s every goddamn time it shows up.
Also it’s fine to use goddamn but not bullshit? I’d guess this was some voice to text thing, but the asterisks were properly escaped.
Not to mention the confusion upon first reading it as “He spreads in the bastards”.
Well I get ick vibes from people who complain about bullshit. What now?
