• TheEmpireStrikesDak@thelemmy.club
    3·
    4 months ago

    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⟩.

    • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      4 months ago

      I don’t know, that’s a level deeper than I know about, but you could be right.

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
      2·
      4 months ago

      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.

      • TheEmpireStrikesDak@thelemmy.club
        3·
        4 months ago

        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:

        þ and ð are digraphs. This means they represent the same sound, much like the modern ‘th’ can be voiced (in words like ‘this’ and ‘that’) or unvoiced (in words like ‘thick’ or ‘through’). The general rule of thumb is that þ comes at the start of a word and ð comes in the middle or at the end. However, you will often see them used interchangeably, with the same word appearing on the same page spelled with both ð forms and þ forms. You can even see words like ‘oþþe’ spelled ‘oþðe’ or ‘oððe’ so don’t overthink it.

        https://oldenglish.info/oestart.html