I think It was common in middle English to omit the ‘e’, leaving it to context for the reader to infer the meaning. I see this in alot of shorthand and other alphabets like Shavian.
Kinda, yeah. The difference is that it’s not a per-word basis where you have to memorize dozens of cases. Much less cumbersome on learners. There’s nothing wrong with just writing ‘ðe’ either, if the writer prefers.
None of us will be “known” for anything on this website. It will all fade. Let them try to be quirky to rage against oblivion, it hardly impacts your life.
In fact, I’m thankful for the stupid trend because I had no idea how to read some of those names in Fire Emblem: Heroes.
It’s more that it makes your posts hard to read for no reason other than a painfully transparent and desperate cry to be “unique” and “quirky.” That said, you do you, man.
Æsþetically it looks dense & unique like ð rare, sunderly dental fricative sounds English makes. “ð” isn’t historic since Old English really didn’t boðer ƿiþ separating voiced vs. unvoiced dental, but ðat’s okay since our broðers up norþ in Iceland use ðese 2 characters in ð manner you prescribe. I like ð mirroring a as ð single-character definite vs. indefinite article too. As someone around ESL (English as a second language) speakers, it can help ðem not only knoƿ hƿich sound to make hƿile preventing silly slip-ups like former US president Donald Trump saying Þighland instead of Thailand—but it ƿould be obvious if our ƿritten form ƿasn’t forced to drop þorn for overloading “y” or “th” for ð printing press’ limitations not built for our tongue.
Before computers or printing presses, ƿe didn’t have spellcheck—so folks spelled ƿords as ðey sound. Having less digraphs favoring more single characters is considered more ergonomic; Dvorak, ð keyboard layout, has “ht” on the home roƿ of ð dominant hand to shoƿ just hoƿ dominant ðis digraph truly is for typing English.
Look, english spelling is already a mess for me to parse (non-native speaker). If y’all start using this other alphabet, I’m just not gonna bother reading.
“Oh no! Anyway” kind of comment, but I must protest somehow.
Do you think it’s shitty for black people in America to use African American English dialect on public forums where non-native speakers could see it? Same deal, just different levels of familiarity. Nothing is forcing anyone to engage with this post, but a lot of people seem to feel a strong enough desire to enforce social conformity that they go out of their way to complain about someone doing something different.
No. Not same deal. One is dialect with slang, which is readable, and which you can just easily look up if you don’t know.
I couldn’t read OP’s post so I looked it up and now I can. All it takes is a little effort, which if you’re not willing to expend you can simply move on.
The other is using letters that even most native English speakers can’t parse.
Sure African American English (which is not just slang, but an entire dialect with a different set of grammatical rules) is common and recognizable to most native English speakers now, but there was a time when it was just as inscrutable to them as OP’s post.
Also, comparing this person’s nonsense to an ethnic group’s way of speaking is highly offensive. I hope you realize that.
I get that you think you’re being progressive by getting offended on others’ behalf, but all you’re really doing is using that ethnic group’s struggle as a rhetorical device to shame me for having a dissenting opinion. I am comparing them because they are alike in a way that is relevant to my point, not because I think they are identical.
Ban ñ from Spanish! My language does not have this character!
Non-native speakers tend to mess up dental fricatives in speech as is. This usage is a good reminder as a character for a sound your language doesn’t have… a lot of languages “th” is pronounced as English “t” which implies aspiration like in Thomas. It is just like learning any other non-Romantic language & is literally in Icelandic—not some made-up character.
Why should the indefinite article, “a”, a single character but the definite article, “the”, takes 3 chars? You know those that created our more modern English decided to respell could with -ould just for symmetry with would & should (Old English was cūþe, with our boy thorn for a dental fricative ending)—so it isn’t like words never changed to look nicer. Middle English often wrote the “the” as þͤ. /ðə/ is the normal transcription. “ð” without specially markers seems fine: single char for a very common word while indicating that it is a voiced sound (meaning not the unvoiced þ).
Aesthetic comes from Greek αἰσθητικός. θ is an unvoiced dental fricative (also the symbol in IPA) just like our boy þ (descended from the Futhark ᚦ). All transcriptions of English dialects I found show it with the “th” in pronunciation… so if you aren’t using a unvoiced dental fricative, you would be the weird one. 🙃
I would agree that fixing the vowels should be a higher priority. But English does not fit a five-vowel system like most Latin languages whose letters were shoehorned onto English. The only way to fix it (ignoring the dialectal splits) would be to either invent an entirely new writing system or going back to the system prior to Latin script adoption since the old system more properly encoded English sounds with few diagraphs & many more vowels to work with. In the latter case you would go for the Anglo-Saxon runes brought to the British Isles by the Angles, Saxons, & Jutes. With modernization, I would support this too tho 😅
In recent years tho & thru have been increasingly more common than though & through. Common words tend to do this—the is a top-10 usage word in English. Makes sense.
Look on how you go from Latin ET/et to &. Turns a common word into a single symbol. Or similar a (and an) coming from Old English ān with cognates in Old Frisian, German, Norse, Saxon, and Gothic with forms like “ein” further being reduced.
If there is a historical precendence for this happening, there is no reason to assume the language’s writing would not, could not, or should not evolve similarly.
They are weirder ones for sure since they look like Ps without extra training. But just slapping two Vs or Us together like the Romans is a hack compared to the historic ƿ (from Runic ᚹ).
But even stranger is why on Earth were “hw” flipped by printing press folks after hundreds of years with the h first due to pronunciation… I wouldn’t be surprised if the voiceless labial–velar fricative went out of fashion based the new spelling to where many (maybe most) speakers don’t differentiate between “w” & “wh”.
I know—but they used to spell the h first too. Almost everyone used to pronounce it ʍ as well, hence my theory that the pronunciation stopped after the wild choice to do a spelling reform
I remember a person on Reddit using this.
þ- th sounding /θ/ (think)
ð- th sounding /ð/ (the)
As to why… I hope OP tells us.
I’ve seen them explain it elsewhere. As i recall, they liked the reaction it got, and do it for that.
Removed by mod
They’re still missing the “e” from “ðe”. That’s what bothers me.
I think It was common in middle English to omit the ‘e’, leaving it to context for the reader to infer the meaning. I see this in alot of shorthand and other alphabets like Shavian.
So the same way we differentiate between the two sounds “th” can make?
Kinda, yeah. The difference is that it’s not a per-word basis where you have to memorize dozens of cases. Much less cumbersome on learners. There’s nothing wrong with just writing ‘ðe’ either, if the writer prefers.
Because I feel like it
B3c4us3 1 f33l l1k3 1t
Same energy tbh
Yes exactly
175 7h3 54m3 45 l337 wh3r3 17’5 ju57 4nn0y1n6 f0r n0 r3450n
(Decoder)
And it hurts just as many people.
None.
Hurts me, at least
Bro thinks they’re a homestuck character
Legit only know homestuck is even a þing þrough Undertale and Megalovania
80% of your comment history is bent on those letters. Is that all you want to be known for?
None of us will be “known” for anything on this website. It will all fade. Let them try to be quirky to rage against oblivion, it hardly impacts your life.
In fact, I’m thankful for the stupid trend because I had no idea how to read some of those names in Fire Emblem: Heroes.
Eh, fair.
But English is hard enough without that kind of dickery.
Are ðose letters really so offensive to you ðat ðey warrant being what you define someone else by?
It’s more that it makes your posts hard to read for no reason other than a painfully transparent and desperate cry to be “unique” and “quirky.” That said, you do you, man.
Lovely, that you paint me as “offended by these letters.”
You don’t know me.
Go back to your fucking ð.
Words definitely not spoken by someone who’s offended by letters.
Go back to crying about it.
This is why kids need hugs, folks. If they get neglected, they turn into annoying attention seekers on the Internet.
I support.
Æsþetically it looks dense & unique like ð rare, sunderly dental fricative sounds English makes. “ð” isn’t historic since Old English really didn’t boðer ƿiþ separating voiced vs. unvoiced dental, but ðat’s okay since our broðers up norþ in Iceland use ðese 2 characters in ð manner you prescribe. I like ð mirroring a as ð single-character definite vs. indefinite article too. As someone around ESL (English as a second language) speakers, it can help ðem not only knoƿ hƿich sound to make hƿile preventing silly slip-ups like former US president Donald Trump saying Þighland instead of Thailand—but it ƿould be obvious if our ƿritten form ƿasn’t forced to drop þorn for overloading “y” or “th” for ð printing press’ limitations not built for our tongue.
Before computers or printing presses, ƿe didn’t have spellcheck—so folks spelled ƿords as ðey sound. Having less digraphs favoring more single characters is considered more ergonomic; Dvorak, ð keyboard layout, has “ht” on the home roƿ of ð dominant hand to shoƿ just hoƿ dominant ðis digraph truly is for typing English.
Look, english spelling is already a mess for me to parse (non-native speaker). If y’all start using this other alphabet, I’m just not gonna bother reading.
“Oh no! Anyway” kind of comment, but I must protest somehow.
Yeah, I think this is a pretty shitty way to behave on a website with a large number of non-native English speakers.
I think the real shitty part is the English itself, not letter changes.
We could do the nice thing and make an easier language the standard? Spanish maybe? Could also do German. /s
I vote for a Klingon/Dothraki hybrid for the global language.
Do you think it’s shitty for black people in America to use African American English dialect on public forums where non-native speakers could see it? Same deal, just different levels of familiarity. Nothing is forcing anyone to engage with this post, but a lot of people seem to feel a strong enough desire to enforce social conformity that they go out of their way to complain about someone doing something different.
No. Not same deal. One is dialect with slang, which is readable, and which you can just easily look up if you don’t know.
The other is using letters that even most native English speakers can’t parse.
Also, comparing this person’s nonsense to an ethnic group’s way of speaking is highly offensive. I hope you realize that.
I couldn’t read OP’s post so I looked it up and now I can. All it takes is a little effort, which if you’re not willing to expend you can simply move on.
Sure African American English (which is not just slang, but an entire dialect with a different set of grammatical rules) is common and recognizable to most native English speakers now, but there was a time when it was just as inscrutable to them as OP’s post.
I get that you think you’re being progressive by getting offended on others’ behalf, but all you’re really doing is using that ethnic group’s struggle as a rhetorical device to shame me for having a dissenting opinion. I am comparing them because they are alike in a way that is relevant to my point, not because I think they are identical.
What the ever-loving fuck are you talking about?
Ban ñ from Spanish! My language does not have this character!
Non-native speakers tend to mess up dental fricatives in speech as is. This usage is a good reminder as a character for a sound your language doesn’t have… a lot of languages “th” is pronounced as English “t” which implies aspiration like in Thomas. It is just like learning any other non-Romantic language & is literally in Icelandic—not some made-up character.
ᚻᛠᛏᚢᚱᛋ᛫ᚷᛟᚾᚾᚫ᛫ᚻᛠᛏ
Translation: häturs᛫gonna᛫hät
I know what this says because of ultima underworld
Ðey do be like ðat sometimes
This was a little easier than reading finnegans Wake but not much. Definitely more humorous though. Thank you.
De nada
Why do you persist in writing “ð” rather than “ðe” for “the”? And… Do you really say æsþetic and not æstetic? Where are you from to do that?
FWIW, do not support, even as a brother up north. English spelling is broken but there are more glaring problems to fix first.
Why should the indefinite article, “a”, a single character but the definite article, “the”, takes 3 chars? You know those that created our more modern English decided to respell could with -ould just for symmetry with would & should (Old English was cūþe, with our boy thorn for a dental fricative ending)—so it isn’t like words never changed to look nicer. Middle English often wrote the “the” as þͤ. /ðə/ is the normal transcription. “ð” without specially markers seems fine: single char for a very common word while indicating that it is a voiced sound (meaning not the unvoiced þ).
Aesthetic comes from Greek αἰσθητικός. θ is an unvoiced dental fricative (also the symbol in IPA) just like our boy þ (descended from the Futhark ᚦ). All transcriptions of English dialects I found show it with the “th” in pronunciation… so if you aren’t using a unvoiced dental fricative, you would be the weird one. 🙃
I would agree that fixing the vowels should be a higher priority. But English does not fit a five-vowel system like most Latin languages whose letters were shoehorned onto English. The only way to fix it (ignoring the dialectal splits) would be to either invent an entirely new writing system or going back to the system prior to Latin script adoption since the old system more properly encoded English sounds with few diagraphs & many more vowels to work with. In the latter case you would go for the Anglo-Saxon runes brought to the British Isles by the Angles, Saxons, & Jutes. With modernization, I would support this too tho 😅
Right, so you’re just arbitrarily changing words. That’s very nice.
In recent years tho & thru have been increasingly more common than though & through. Common words tend to do this—the is a top-10 usage word in English. Makes sense.
Look on how you go from Latin ET/et to &. Turns a common word into a single symbol. Or similar a (and an) coming from Old English ān with cognates in Old Frisian, German, Norse, Saxon, and Gothic with forms like “ein” further being reduced.
If there is a historical precendence for this happening, there is no reason to assume the language’s writing would not, could not, or should not evolve similarly.
I have no problem reading text that uses these characters, but hƿich and hƿile really bother me.
https://youtu.be/nfVEvgWd4ek
They are weirder ones for sure since they look like Ps without extra training. But just slapping two Vs or Us together like the Romans is a hack compared to the historic ƿ (from Runic ᚹ).
But even stranger is why on Earth were “hw” flipped by printing press folks after hundreds of years with the h first due to pronunciation… I wouldn’t be surprised if the voiceless labial–velar fricative went out of fashion based the new spelling to where many (maybe most) speakers don’t differentiate between “w” & “wh”.
I was talking about the beginning “h”, not the ƿ. Because there are people who pronounce it like that.
I know—but they used to spell the h first too. Almost everyone used to pronounce it ʍ as well, hence my theory that the pronunciation stopped after the wild choice to do a spelling reform
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_labial–velar_fricative
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_digraphs#W
You don’t get it, I find it annoying so you should cater to me. STOP HAVING FUN BECAUSE I FEEL EXCLUDED!!!1!1!1
/s