Re: The Hobbit, after all these years

--- On Sat, 11/10/12, Jenny Tait <piratejenny@verizon.net> wrote:

> >
> Yeah. I like that one. :-) It's pronounced like "th" though.
> And looks
> like of like a p.

Yep, that's thorn. It was one of ways to write the phoneme 'th' as one letter then, along with 'eth', which is basically a 'd' with a line through the top, to demonstrate the difference between the two slightly different sounds. We still have those symbols in IPA, although we've dropped them in the English alphabet.

I now want to hunt for a couple of books I know I own, but I'm not sure where they are now. My Old English Reader, leftover from an undergraduate course in Anglo-Saxon, and Ruth Noel's The Languages of Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Ellen