Eth (Ð, ð), also spelt 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, and in Älvdalen Dalecarlian. 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).

In Icelandic, ð represents a voiced dental fricative, as in th in English "them"; however, the name of the letter is pronounced eþ, i.e., voiceless, unless followed by a vowel: it is never the first letter of a word. In Faroese, ð isn't assigned to any particular phoneme but is mostly there 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 as . 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 introduced for etymological reasons.

In the Älvdalen Dalecarlian orthography, the ð represents a voiced dental fricative, as in th in English "them", and it follows d in their alphabet.

In Old English, ð 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; 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

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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.

Miscellany

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• The letter ð is sometimes used in mathematical and engineering textbooks as a symbol for a partial derivative, but the more usual symbol is ∂.
• The modern Greek letter delta (Δ, δ) has, in general, the same phonetic value, and ð is the only actual Latin alphabet letter faithfully representing delta's phonetic value.

External links

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• How to make the Eth
• Förslag till en enhetlig stavning för älvdalska (March, 2005)

References

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

Faroese language | Icelandic language | Middle English language | Old English language | Uncommon Latin letters | Phonetic transcription symbols

Ð | Ð | Eth (lizherenn) | Ð | Ð | Ð | Ð | Ð | Ð | Ð | Ð | Eth | Ð | Ð