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Eth
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Eth (Ð, ð; also spelled edh or eð) is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian. It was also used
in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a D with a line partially
through the vertical stroke. The lower case resembles an insular d with a line through the top. The lower-case letter has been adopted to
represent a voiced dental fricative in the IPA.

The letter originated in Irish writing (Freeborn 1992, 24) as a d with a cross-stroke added. The lowercase version has retained the curved shape of a medieval scribe's d, which d itself
in general has not.

In Icelandic, ð represents a voiced dental fricative like th in English "them", but it never appears as the first letter of a word. The name of the letter is pronounced eθ, i.e., voiceless,
unless followed by a vowel. It has also been labeled an "interdental fricative."[1]

In Faroese, ð isn't assigned to any particular phoneme and appears mostly for etymological reasons; however, it does show where most of the Faroese glides are, and when the ð is
before r it is, in a few words, pronounced [ɡ]. In the Icelandic and Faroese alphabets, ð follows d.

In Olav Jakobsen Høyem's version of Nynorsk based on Trøndersk, the ð is always silent and is introduced for etymological reasons.

In the orthography for Elfdalian, the ð represents a voiced dental fricative like th in English "them", and it follows d in the alphabet.

In Old English, ð (referred to as ðæt by the Anglo-Saxons) was used interchangeably with þ (thorn) to represent either voiced or voiceless dental fricatives. The letter ð was used
throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, but gradually fell out of use in Middle English, disappearing altogether by about 1300;[citation needed] þ survived longer, ultimately being replaced by
the modern digraph th by about 1500.

The ð is also used by some in written Welsh to represent the letter 'dd' (the voiced dental fricative).[citation needed]

Lower-case eth is used as a symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), again for a voiced dental fricative, and in IPA usage, the name of the symbol is pronounced with the
same voiced sound, as /ɛð/. (The IPA symbol for the voiceless dental fricative is θ.)

Contents
1 Computer input
2 Miscellaneous
3 See also
A handwritten ð is visible.
4 Notes and references
5 External links

Computer input

System Uppercase Lowercase Notes

Unicode U+00D0 U+00F0 Inherited from the older ISO 8859-1 standard

HTML Ð ð

Unix-like Compose key plus d and h Compose key plus D and H For ISO8859-based locales

Unix-like Compose key plus d and h Compose key plus D and h For UTF-8-based locales

Mac OS X Shift+Option+D Option+d Typed by activating the US Extended keyboard layout

Microsoft Windows Alt key 0208 Alt key 0240 AltGr+d with the US International keyboard layout

Miscellaneous
The letter ð is sometimes used in mathematics and engineering textbooks as a symbol for a spin-weighted partial derivative. This operator gives rise to spin-weighted spherical
harmonics.
The modern Greek letter delta (∆, δ) has, in general, the same phonetic value, and ð is the only Latin alphabet letter faithfully representing delta's phonetic value. (In Ancient
Greek, delta represented a d sound.)
The symbol is mentioned in the Rush song By-Tor and the Snow Dog in the first verse:

Prince By-Tor takes the cavern to the North light,

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Eth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%90

The sign of Eth is rising in the air.

See also
D with stroke
African D
Insular script

Notes and references

1. ^ American Heritage Dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=eth)

Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan.

External links
Thorn and eth: how to get them right (http://briem.net/2/2.11/index.htm)
Förslag till en enhetlig stavning för älvdalska (March, 2005) (http://www.alvdalen.se/alvdalska/alvdalsk_ortografi.pdf) (Swedish)

The basic modern Latin alphabet

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth"

Categories: Faroese language | Icelandic language | Middle English language | Old English language | Old Norse language | Uncommon Latin letters | Phonetic transcription symbols |
Palaeographic letter variants

This page was last modified on 25 June 2010 at 12:04.

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