Eth

Eth (Ð, ð; also spelled edh or eð) is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a D with a line through the vertical stroke. The lower case resembles an insular d with a line through the top. The lower-case letter has been adopted to represent a voiced dental fricative in the IPA.

The letter originated in Irish writing^[1] as a d with a cross-stroke added. The lowercase version has retained the curved shape of a medieval scribe's d, which d itself in general has not.

In Icelandic, ð represents a voiced dental fricative like th in English "them", but it never appears as the first letter of a word. The name of the letter is pronounced [ɛθ], i.e., voiceless, unless followed by a vowel. It has also been labeled an "interdental fricative."^[2]

In Faroese, ð is not assigned to any particular phoneme and appears mostly for etymological reasons; however, it does show where most of the Faroese glides are, and when the ð is before r it is, in a few words, pronounced [ɡ]. In the Icelandic and Faroese alphabets, ð follows d.

In Olav Jakobsen Høyem's version of Nynorsk based on Trøndersk, the ð is always silent and is introduced for etymological reasons.

In the orthography for Elfdalian, the ð represents a voiced dental fricative like th in English "them", and it follows d in the alphabet.

In Old English, ð (referred to as ðæt by the Anglo-Saxons) was used interchangeably with þ (thorn) to represent either voiced or voiceless dental fricatives. The letter ð was used throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, but gradually fell out of use in Middle English, practically disappearing altogether by 1300;^[3] þ survived longer, ultimately being replaced by the modern digraph th by about 1500.

The ð is also used by some in written Welsh to represent the letter 'dd' (the voiced dental fricative).^[4]

Lower-case eth is used as a symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), again for a voiced dental fricative, and in IPA usage, the name of the symbol is pronounced with the same voiced sound, as /ɛð/ (the IPA symbol for the voiceless dental fricative is θ).

Computer input

Miscellaneous

• The letter ð is sometimes used in mathematics and engineering textbooks as a symbol for a spin-weighted partial derivative. This operator gives rise to spin-weighted spherical harmonics.
• The modern Greek letter delta (Δ, δ) has, in general, the same phonetic value, and ð is the only Latin alphabet letter faithfully representing delta's phonetic value. (In Ancient Greek, delta represented a d sound.)
• The symbol is mentioned in the Rush song "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" in the first verse:

Prince By-Tor takes the cavern to the North light,
The sign of Eth is rising in the air.

See also

• Thorn
• D with stroke
• African D
• Insular script

Notes and references

• Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan.

External links

• "Thorn and eth: how to get them right", Operinan, Briem, http://briem.net/~operinan/2/2.11/ .
• "Alvdalsk ortografi" (in Swedish) (PDF), Förslag till en enhetlig stavning för älvdalska, SE, March, 2005, http://www.alvdalen.se/alvdalska/alvdalsk_ortografi.pdf .