Re: USAGE: Thorn vs Eth

Greetings,

> > Kendra wrote:
> > > I'm curious as to how many natural languages have th and dh, as I
heard that
> > > not many do. Anyone? :)
> >
> > Modern Greek for one.  Castilian Spanish has /T/ and [D] as an
allophone
> > of /d/.  Icelandic has /T/ and /D/.  I can't think of any others
> > off-head.  Those are fairly rare.
> >
> >
> Albanian. And my very limited experience with it tells me that /T/ and
/D/
> aren't as marginal as in say, english, or icelandic.
Don't forget Welsh and Cornish! Breton lost them, though -- they became
/z/. Old Gaelic had them, but they disappeared sometime towards the end
of the Middle Gaelic (or Early Modern Gaelic, perhaps -- I'm crap with
dates) period.

Classical/Modern Standard Arabic has them as well, though the spoken
dialects often change them to either t/d or s/z. Biblical Hebrew had
them too. Syriac did, and (at least some of) its modern decendants still
do.

Also, I've read that in Turkmen, s and z are realised as /T/ and /D/.
Sort of a national lisp, I guess. :)

BTW, back to the letters thorn and edh, it bears pointing out that
although Faroese uses the letter edh (the only language other than
Icelandic, AFAIK, to do so) it is there for etymological purposes only;
it is silent in pronunciation, the sounds /T/ and /D/ having been
completely lost.

Thomas

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