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The Thorn Legacy
Posted by processcamera in
15 May 2012 — 10:16am
15 May 2012 — 10:16am
For what it's worth:
"A rare excitement ran through The New Yorker's copy department last week when it was discovered that a line of Middle English poetry quoted in a piece by Peter Hessler about standing in police lineups had a thorn in it. Usually a thorn, like a splinter, is something you want to remove, with tweezers, or maybe a sterile needle, but this thorn was something we wanted desperately to insert ...."
www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/the-thorn-in-the-new-yorker...
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15 May 2012 — 10:49am
Cool story.
One thing:
"
We have used characters from the Greek alphabet, some of which require not one but two accents, and the Cyrillic alphabet.
....
For a while, we tried faithfully to reproduce the backward “R” in Toys “R” Us, but it went rogue and ran loose on the page every time we turned our back.
"
The thing was right under their noses! :-)
hhp
15 May 2012 — 11:14am
It was incorrect to state that Thorn is “…an obsolete letter from the Anglo-Saxon alphabet…” because it is a current letter, of the Icelandic/Faroese alphabet, which the writer could have mentioned—after all, that is why the character was available for the article (in the standard Western Latin encoding), as opposed to Wynn, for instance, which is less likely to be in the fonts used by the New Yorker.
15 May 2012 — 11:21am
I don’t quite understand what the big deal is about this. Do they not know how to access the thorn glyph in their fonts?
David
15 May 2012 — 12:19pm
It's not a huge deal I guess, but it's a nice reminder of what has been lost. In fact if people had sense they would re-introduce the Thorn and Eth into English.
hhp
15 May 2012 — 1:14pm
And use them how? In Anglo-Saxon, the sounds represented by these letters were allographs, so their use in spelling was never consistent. Either letter might be indiscriminately used to represent either a voiced or unvoiced dental fricative.
15 May 2012 — 1:23pm
Nice to see that little editorial office so worked up they just had to write a blog on it.
Thorns are nothing special. Only last week I had to typeset an article on African phonology with no less than three new additions to the ever-expanding set of special characters those authors desperately need to convey the subtleties of the language they are writin' about: curly n, curly d, and curly t. Neither of these were in my current repertoire, so I Just Made Them without batting an eye-lid.
(It did help this was a fine opportunity to test my own home-grown software. It worked just fine. :) )
15 May 2012 — 2:18pm
Why not just make a decision now and stick to it? Even a 50% chance of a clear one-to-one mapping sticking is better than the "th" sequence having three possible pronunciations.
hhp
15 May 2012 — 2:36pm
The IPA use ð for a voiced dental fricative (they use θ for the unvoiced), so it probably makes most sense to maintain that, and to reserve þ for the unvoiced: Ðe Þorn Legacy.
15 May 2012 — 2:38pm
better than the "th" sequence having three possible pronunciations
Oh, I can think of four offhand:
this
thin
thomist
lofthouse
and yet we manage.
15 May 2012 — 2:46pm
"The Porn Legacy"? Oh, wait, no ...
15 May 2012 — 2:58pm
Humans managed without shoes for a long time too.
hhp
15 May 2012 — 3:10pm
Yeah, and then it took them a very long time to think of making left– and right ones.
15 May 2012 — 5:02pm
What is the difference between the "th" in "thin" and "thomist", assuming the "th" in "this" is the unvoiced one?
15 May 2012 — 5:46pm
The beginning of "Thomist" is (fittingly) pronounced like that of "Thomas."
15 May 2012 — 7:29pm
You have that backwards.
thin = unvoiced dental fricative /θ/
this = voiced dental fricative /ð/
As Craig notes, thomist is pronounced as in Thomas, i.e. an aspirated alveolar plosive.
15 May 2012 — 7:38pm
> better than the "th" sequence having three possible pronunciations
Some of my Irish relatives only have one; "D".
16 May 2012 — 12:43am
http://þorn.info
16 May 2012 — 8:34am
@John Hudson:
As Craig notes, thomist is pronounced as in Thomas, i.e. an aspirated alveolar plosive.
Tom begins with an unvoiced aspirated alveolar plosive. Occasionally, it is true, people will pronounce "Thomas" in a quick, lazy fashion, but surely that isn't correct.
16 May 2012 — 10:31am
Probably about as correct as writing Johann as John. As an aside, the Icelandic version of Thomas is Tómas; pronounced the same.
16 May 2012 — 11:01am
'Quadibloc', I don't see how we're disagreeing. The point is that the th in thomist is an alveolar plosive -- unvoiced and aspirated, as you note -- and not a dental fricative as in thin and this.
16 May 2012 — 11:15am
Guys, as long as there's more than two it's worth taking a shot; in fact even if there were only two it would be worth it because it couldn't get worse. So let's get practical:
Should the Thorn be like this and the Eth like thin, or vice versa? I've come to prefer the former, and I think I based it on some historical leaning*, but I don't mind flipping. I'm not talking about pretending the difference used to be clear, I'm essentially talking about reform.
* Is there really none at all?
hhp
16 May 2012 — 11:15am
Should the Thorn be like this and the Eth like thin, or vice versa?
Vice versa. See my comment re. IPA usage above.
16 May 2012 — 11:19am
Makes sense. Although I think they made a mistake (on a number of levels).
hhp
16 May 2012 — 12:57pm
I wrote in to the author (done quite easily:
firstname_lastname@newyorker.com) and told her their fundamental problem was inability to handle Unicode. Yet their magazine is so terribly attached to ë, ö, and è. Not to mention their fake small caps and absurd acronym rules.16 May 2012 — 1:19pm
Well, non-designers shouldn't need to handle codes, so it's more of an inability to realize and leverage the extent of "para-keyboard" characters.
hhp
16 May 2012 — 3:43pm
The thorn has been there for years in pre-Unicode Latin-1 fonts in Windows, on position #254. It's still there, in the official Latin-1 block (which is a verbatim copy of the Windows codepage).
...That is, if the font designer included it -- that's another issue.
17 May 2012 — 5:32am
@Theunis – Bzzzt, wrong. Windows-1252 is not identical to Latin-1. Windows has display characters where ECMA has control characters.