@dancingtreefrog It's a tragedy. I don't know if the Wikipedia entry is right, but if it is we lost þ because of printers not having it available and making do with y. I don't feel that's a very good reason!
@timtfj Completely agreed. A lot of good letters got thrown out for 'practical' reasons over the centuries.
I used to do hand letterpress (type setting by hand) so I understand the difficulties of dealing with a huge tray of letters. But in our present digital era, we don't have to physically handle letters to use them!
@dancingtreefrog One thing using þ and ð would do is make it easier for English people to grasp Welsh pronunciations—Welsh uses <dd> for /ð/ and <th> for /θ/, so they're both <th> in English spelling. It would make it obvious which is which.
@timtfj I remember learning the International Phonemic Alphabet when taking literature at university. The idea of an alphabet aimed at recording the actual "as pronounced" sound of any language appealed to me. Of course, it has difficulties with differences in pronunciation, which translate to different spellings, even within the same language. But I thought the *idea* was great.
@dancingtreefrog @timtfj
I'm not in that field at all but wasn't the point of having a phonetic alphabet to precisely have different spellings when ... pronounced differently?
@benjamin @timtfj Understood. I think part of it was to capture "the sounds the speaker actually used" vs "the official sound of the language".
I just think it makes studying individual words more difficult if you have to adjust for how a speaker in one part of the UK (for instance since the UK is jammed full of dialects) from the same word as spoken by someone else in the UK.
Sometimes I think the real purpose was so singers could sing any language without understanding a word they said! 😉
@dancingtreefrog The Wikipedia article suggests it was because the type was made in the Netherlands and Belgium, though that's disputed on the talk page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) I think I also read a while ago that a lot of the early printers in the UK came over from there, but I may be misremembering. Especially since I didn't read it in English.
@timtfj Well, Johannes Gutenberg was German. Did German use thorn?
It doesn't look like Old High German used thorn:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_High_German#Consonants
I think languages in the Netherlands and Belgium were closer to German than they were to English. And England back then had very close trading ties with the Netherlands
So maybe the letter set the printers brought over to England didn't include thorn to start with?
@dancingtreefrog By Gutenberg's time, both þ and ð were gone from German. Letters resembling them were still in use as scribal abbreviations, but because of class reasons, Gutenberg decided to not support these in his printed books.
Oct 9, 2026, 7:31 AM@dancingtreefrog @timtfj Chinese typesetters are staring at you with undisguised hostility now.
@timtfj Ironically, early printing fonts had this issue because they came from Germany, where þ didn't seem like a particularly important letter to make.
@riley @timtfj Early printing was a commercial enterprise! German business: Don't spend money on something you don't need. We don't use thorn, so don't make it.
Like good old ASCII. The only people that used it used English or maybe a few other European languages. Certainly not Cryllic, any of those weird central European languages, or any Asian languages!
Oct 9, 2026, 7:33 AM@dancingtreefrog @riley @timtfj And then there's the travesty of the "Han Unification".
If you want to know why it's a travesty, consider a putative "Greek Unification" that shoved Greek, Latin, and Cyrillic characters into a single bucket and called it the same character set.
@ZDL Yuck!
Oct 9, 2026, 7:41 AM@dancingtreefrog Indeed. It's why I don't like Unicode. Beyond the consortium gatekeeping what words from which languages make it into their collection of "glyphs", the fact that they just arbitrarily decided that Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were "meh, basically the same thing" sticks in my craw really hard.
It means I can't write a mixed text where it's instantly clear to, say, textual analysis tooling which language I'm using at any given point, for example.
@ZDL Yes, that's a problem. I think they essentially treated most European languages the same way: "They all use the same alphabet except an occasional fiddly bit, so just stick in an occasional fiddly bit into the character set." So you can write text with a mix of English, French, German, etc, with nothing *in the text* that specifically indicates "This word is English, this is French, this is German." What separates a French/German word from "English" text if it doesn't use anything "fiddly"?
Oct 9, 2026, 8:19 AM@dancingtreefrog Yep. All the Latin-based writing systems got stuck together, but that was before Unicode; it inherited that particular mess.
But it didn't inherit the CJK Han Unification mess. There was a Japanese encoding that had that solved BEFORE Unicode existed. And the ISO explicitly binned a solution that Japan came up with, with Korean (and presumably Chinese but I don't know) support and forced Han Unification without consensus of the three nations involved.
Because of course.
@ZDL Oh, yes, colonialist tradition. "You may have had civilizations 2000 years before us, but we know best!"
@ZDL I think that particular mess also came out of colonialist views that UK/France/Germany and derivatives (Netherlands, Belgium, etc) were superior to other parts of Europe (such as Italy, Greece, Russia, Poland, Spain, the nations of the Caucasus, etc). No real need to address the needs of the inferiors except insofar as it impacted the needs of the superiors.
Stupid humans, as if speaking different languages meant you weren't the same humans under it all. 😞
@ZDL For Greek Unification to be truly Greek, it must include unifying the Cyrillic 'ш' and Egyptian '𓆷' and perhaps also Hebrew 'ש' Backwards compatibility!
Strangely, Unicode has unified the three first generations of Egyptian glyphs — hieroglyphs, Hieratic, and Demotic — together. Or, well, it pretended to. The transition covers over some three thousand years of literary cultures, and linear counterparts don't always exist. Coptic is separate, although there was an early attempt to unify it with Greek; didn't work out, so now Unicode has Greek-And-Coptic letters, and then separate Coptic letters.
On the other hand, most Brahmic scripts are very closely related syllabaries, and yet, Unicode hasn't seen it fit to unify those, let alone the hundreds of different forms of the Hindu-Arabic decimal digits that have proliferated in Asian scripts.
Oct 10, 2026, 5:52 AM@riley @dancingtreefrog @timtfj It's almost as if the entire Unicode creation process was forced by those ignorant of writing systems on those whose writing systems they didn't understand and then kinda/sorta/butnotquite ad-hoc jammed in.
While gatekeeping what goes in.
Oct 10, 2026, 3:12 PM«For Greek Unification to be truly Greek, it must include unifying the Cyrillic 'ш' and Egyptian '𓆷' and perhaps also Hebrew 'ש' Backwards compatibility!»
This must be sarcasm about getting the sound of Ш (or Ж or Ч) into Greek phonetics.
@vnikolov Well, sort of.
The corresponding Coptic letter is Ϣ. As you know, most Coptic letters come from Greek, but this one is one of the few that comes from Demotic Egyptian, specifically because Greek doesn't have the corresponding sound, and I suppose the loose reinterpretation technique that Greeks had used when Greek letters were still being actively invented, most significantly, to make a couple of Phoenician consonants into Greek vowels, had gone out of fashion.
@ZDL @dancingtreefrog timtfj@mastodon.social
Oct 11, 2026, 12:31 PMRight.
I think the differences in phonetics jumped to my mind so fast that they shadowed the point about the connection between the origins of Cyrillic, Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Phoenician writing.
This is a simplified list in alphabetical order; chronological order would be better (with Cyrillic last), but I am not sure how to order then the variants of Greek writing versus Hebrew writing.
Oct 9, 2026, 2:35 PM@timtfj @dancingtreefrog I like this idea.
I'd also like to lobby for including the interrobang (‽) and making it commonly used.