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Eth




Eth (Ð, ð), also spelled ''edh'' or ''eð'', is a Letter used in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and present-day Icelandic , and in Faroese Alphabet in which it is called the letter ''edd''. It was also used in Medieval Scandinavia , but was subsequently replaced with ''dh'' and later ''d''.

The letter originated in Irish writing (Freeborn 1992, 24), and originated 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 (but see for instance the Audi logo). Some scholars therefore argue that Eth (Ðð) and D With Stroke (Đđ) are actually the same letter with local glyph variants , like '' ø '' and '' ö '', but the Unicode Consortium decided not to unify them.

In Icelandic, ''ð'' represents a voiced dental s, ''ð'' follows ''d''. In Olav Jakobsen Høyem 's version of Nynorsk based on Trøndersk , the ''ð'' is always silent and introduced for etymological reasons. In Älvdalska orthography, the ''ð'' has the sound value {Link without Title} and is a preserved from Old Norse.

In Old English , ''ð'' was used interchangably 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; ''þ'' survived longer, ultimately being replaced by the modern digraph ''th'' by about 1500.

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 .


COMPUTER ENCODING

In the Unicode universal character encoding standard, upper and lower case eth are represented by U+00D0 and U+00F0, respectively. These code points are inherited from the older ISO 8859-1 standard. In HTML , eth is represented by the Latin character entities Ð and ð.


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References


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