Bring back þe letter þ. How can you þrow out þe only rune in your alphabet?
Also bring back ð. But ðis time, except in very common words like þe which look nice þe oðer way round, don't treat ðem as interchangeable. Use ð for þe voiced one and þ for þe unvoiced one, like ðey do in Icelandic.
Enoȝ is enoȝ.
A few ways to spell "enough". The full list in the OED entry is several times as long. Thankfully "enoȝ" *is* one of them. These are just ones from Middle English.
[ Edited to correct the alt-text: 108 spellings here, not just 101. But I've most likely miscounted again. ]
@timtfj AGREED!
@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 @benjamin Well I'm not an expert either, but the phonetic alphabet is used a lot in writing about things like regional accents or pronunciation changes over time.
There are different levels of precision too—phonemic transcriptions that indicate speech sounds but not what accent to say them in, or stricter transcriptions that try to show the exact sound made.
@dancingtreefrog @benjamin Talking of different accents, I had a weird experience at university when a new student I'd not spoken to before came into the shared kitchen and said "Have you got a cap I can borrow?", which I was baffled by. "A *cap*?" "No, a cap! You know, to drink out of . . . ! " He meant a cup, but I'd misunderstood by thinking I'd hear a Northern accent when actually he had a strong London one.
@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?
@timtfj @dancingtreefrog I've read that in couple of places that it was because the first printing presses brought to England were brought by the Dutch. The book, The Book-Makers A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives, has a whole chapter about it.
@katherine_montalto @dancingtreefrog That's an interesting looking title! The information I'm half remembering was somewhere in this, which I was reading to combine learning more Norwegian with learning about the history of English (and of connections between the two).
@timtfj that book looks amazing! I wish I understood Norwegian. The book-makers is an excellent book. Especially if your interested in language history
@katherine_montalto Do you have more details of the book about printing? It sounds like one I'd enjoy reading, especially if it goes into the history of types of printing press and so on.
@timtfj So for the late reply. The book is,
The Book-Makers
A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives
By Adam Smyth
I got my copy from bookshop dot org
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-book-makers-a-history-of-the-book-in-eighteen-lives-adam-smyth/bf9772aaa63f297c?ean=9781541605640
@katherine_montalto Thanks! It looks as though there's a nicely affordable paperback available here, too: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-book-makers-a-history-of-the-book-in-18-remarkable-lives-adam-smyth/28e64aa050c42c8d
@timtfj very nice! it was first published in the UK so they must have got the paperback sooner. Let me know if you read it. I really liked it.
@katherine_montalto I actually tried to order it from that page this evening, but couldn't get the payment to go through! I've a feeling that happened previously when I tried to order something from them. I'll definitely let you know if I manage to get hold of it. :-)
@timtfj maybe your local library has a copy
@katherine_montalto They might! It looks like the sort of thing someone might suggest/request.
@katherine_montalto It's a nice language. I didn't learn it a very conventional way, because I couldn't find a tutor book or similar at the time. I did find a basic grammar book though, and set about learning it through interacting on Twitter! It was an interesting process.
I think the grammar is simpler than English in some ways. E.g. verbs just have one form for each tense, so there's no "ich bin, du bist, er/sie/es ist"—present tense is just "jeg er, du er" etc., with "er" for each person.
@katherine_montalto ("Er" is pronounced like English "are").
@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 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, 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.
@dancingtreefrog That's not true, though. If you look at the history, the early European printers made hardly any money; they were mostly guided by imagining what they'd do with the press.
In choosing his glyphs, Gutenberg aimed to mimic high-prestige and expensive hand-written Bibles of the time, the sort that only rich people could afford. Accordingly, he skipped over virtually all scribal contractions, which were common in utilitarian texts where the cost of writing material mattered, but not in expensive books. On the other hand, his "alphabet" included over a hundred various ligatures, merely because doing ligatures well was one of the signs of a highly trained and expensive scribe, the sort whose books a rich man might want to buy. Most of these are obsolete in modern typography.
@dancingtreefrog Oh, and also: the earliest of Gutenberg's printings were done in Latin, not German. The association of printing technology with Germanic linguistics became quite important for centuries to come soon thereafter, though.
@riley @dancingtreefrog I wonder whether it was also a matter of high-status Latin versus low-status English. I know there were arguments at one point over whether English was even a usable language for serious writing. (Hence the creation of lots of English versions of Latin words taken from academic writing, partly to show that English *could* be used, and partly to be able to translate the Latin into English.)
@timtfj Neither Gutenberg nor his near-followers would have cared about English at that time, I'm pretty sure. They cared about Latin and German, but, well, within the Holy Roman Empire, proto-German came in a thousand different varieties, so a bunch of languages that are now considered to be not quite German were covered by falling into the same Sprachbund (and being written by as same script as feasible in an era of every scribe having a slightly different hand).
Implementing support for the English peculiarities would have fallen upon those who imported the printing tech from the continent, and, well, it looks like they were enough of cheapskates to give up on þ. Perhaps they had heard how unprofitable Gutenberg's own business had been and were wary of putting more money into it than they strictly had to, and by the time it was clear there was money in printing, þ had already gone out of fashion. Or perhaps they foresaw they'd be printing much cheaper books than the Gutenberg Bible, and they thought that if they made three more letters, they'd also have to make hundreds of the scribal contractions that used to go with utilitarian-class manuscripts and records. It's also possible that there was some sort of delay in importing the know-how of typemaking, and for a while, the early English typesetters were stuck with Dutch-made type.
Contrariwise, it seems that the early French printers were quite keen on adding the many French diacritics. Interestingly, at the time, German didn't yet even generally use umlaut as we now know it; the proper form for marking the phonetic umlaut was considered to be a small 'e' letter above the base vowel: aͤ, oͤ, uͤ. The use of diæresis to mark umlaut came later; I don't entirely know its origins, but I'd speculate it may have been a narrow scribal practice that caught on, but it might also have been influenced by the French trema, although it marks a different phonetic construct, as in ë, ï, ü within diphthongs.
As prestige classes go, well, the Catholic way of calling everything non-Latin 'vulgar languages' was still influential, and much of the modern European ethnogenesis hadn't even taken place yet. By that time, the royal court of England was not entirely a French-fest anymore, but for most English-speaking commoners, their primary ethnic identity would have been more tied to their locality than to England as a concept. This also applied to France at commoner and commerce level, even though French tended to have a higher prestige class than English in international use due to its lingua franca status.
(Sorry, I had to feed the special kitty.)
I might be wrong, but FWIW, I'd associate the debates of whether English would be usable for serious writing more with Chaucer's times than late 1500s. The "Can it be done?" seems to have been settled already; the "Should it be done?", well, might still have been an issue.
@dancingtreefrog
@timtfj Oops! I misremembered when Gutenberg lived. He actually did his pressing work in mid-1400s, not mid-1500s, less than a century after Chaucer, and more than a century before the firm anchor of the latest point of "Yes, English is good enough" that was Shakespeare. Then, a lingering "Can it be done?" might still have been around.
@dancingtreefrog
@riley @dancingtreefrog I did think it sounded a bit late! But my picture of the dates of some of these things is pretty vague :-)
Lots of interesting stuff in all that!
Re the umlauts, at some point I looked at some of the various Wikipedias' articles¹ about the letter å, and was surprised to discover how early it was used in Swedish compared to Danish and Norwegian. I don't remember the actual dates now . . .
_____
¹ different language Wikipedias
@riley @dancingtreefrog . . . but I think it was some time around the 1910s for Norwegian and a few years early for Danish, but something like 1400 or 1500 for Swedish. So basically Norwegian and Danish were adopting an old letter from Swedish.
(NB the language situation was complicated. Norwegian didn't have a written form for something like 450 years because of Danish rule, and efforts to create one started in the mid 19th century, leading eventually to today's Bokmål and Nynorsk)
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.
@jzb
I mean, the fact that you can find the character and use it means that it is already included.
I have it pinned in my clipboard and use it semi-regularly
Mayhaps I should do the same with þ and ð, though I have a feeling that daily use would annoy the heck out of my online friends (or maybe not 🤔 )
@timtfj @dancingtreefrog
@DelilahTech @jzb @dancingtreefrog I get ð and þ (on my phone) by having Norwegian set as one of the languages in SwiftKey and using Norwegian keyboard layout. They come as long-press extras. (For IPA symbols and the like I store them as clipboard entries with shortcuts, eg "ohn" makes ɔ̃ pop up.)
@timtfj @dancingtreefrog Ƿelsh uses c for the sound of English k because there were so many such sounds that English printers didn't have enough Ks. I believe the same explanation goes for using f and ff for English v and f - plenty of Fs in the type, but not enough Vs for Welsh.
When Welsh colonists in Patagonia started a newspaper using a Spanish press, they wound up swapping back to v - whence spellings such as Dolavon and Trevelin.
@tortipede @dancingtreefrog Very interesting! I'd assumed it was just how the spelling had evolved. Eg because using f for English v would make it unambiguous that it wasn't a u.
Also þe gloɂl stop.
@EricLawton I had a friend at university who couldn't say "glottal stop" without it turning into "glottalschtopp". (He wasn't German.)
@timtfj interesting to see that "enough", the word with the most unintuitive spelling in the entire English language (I am sure that is not true, English has so much unintuitive spelling) evolved from even worse spelling!
Enuff is enuff!
@micke The really interesting one to me was an earlier one, where it was spelt "genug"—ie the same as the equivalent German word now. I can't remember quite how far back. I'd never realised they were related. Rather like if you rewrite "gestern" as "yestern", and suddenly it doesn't seem remotely odd that it means yesterday :-)
@timtfj very interesting! In Swedish it is "nog", I understand now!
@timtfj it is not the spelling that is wrong, it is the pronunciation 😄
@micke Og "nok" i norsk!
@micke Correction: looked again and it was genog, not genug. They've got a lot to say about the sound of the final g and how it developed. It started off as one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_velar_fricative .
@ancientsounds @micke Ahh thank you :-)
@ancientsounds @micke That's the thing, isn't it? And even if somehow you get a consistent spelling at some point, there's no guarantee of it *staying* consistent. Once some pronunciations change in different directions, it's inconsistent again and all that's happened is that the spelling no longer reflects the history of the word. So some information has been lost.
I like spellings that tell me more than just "the" pronunciation.
@timtfj Isn't spelling fun!? Especially how it has changed over the centuries.
Written Hawaiian is much simpler. 13 letters: 5 vowels, 8 consonants. Each is pronounced consistently. The vowels also form dipthongs that are also pronounced consistently.
Add the 'okina (glottal stop) and the kahako (macron to distinguish long vowels from short vowels), and you have every written character.
I think these are all reasons why Hawaiian is such a beautiful language for singing!
@dancingtreefrog @timtfj easier than Spanish and Italian, wow!
@mdione @timtfj I used to speak Spanish, never tried Italian.
The big controversy when written Hawaiian was being developed was how to write the sound English calls the letter L. The people developing it couldn't decide between using L or R.
So they typeset and printed some passages using each option and presented them to the king of Hawaii, who decided he liked how it looked with L better than with R.
Small things, eh?
@dancingtreefrog @timtfj I would say also very good, for the L English sound I, coming from Spanish, prefer the L letter because the mechanism is more similar than to R.
Then there's the fact that for Sino-Japanese[1] languages, they confuse both sounds, and I don't know exactly why.
[1] not an academic, so I don't know the right term.
@mdione @dancingtreefrog I don't know any of those languages, but don't they use a sound which is more or less midway between our R an L? So R and L will just sound like variants of that phoneme, not two different ones?