@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.