@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)