In modern Icelandic, yes, and that’s certainly more pleasing, but historically thorn was also used for the voiced phoneme, and with the advent of printing press (which didn’t get imported with a thorn), it got written y, which is how you got “ye olde”.
mrslt@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The thorn (Þ) represents the voiceless dental fricative (think the “th” sound in “think”, “thick”, “thistle”, and so on).
To represent the voiced dental fricative, (think the “th” sound in “these”, “there”, “weather”, and so on) use the eth (Ð), not the thorn.
davidagain@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
In modern Icelandic, yes, and that’s certainly more pleasing, but historically thorn was also used for the voiced phoneme, and with the advent of printing press (which didn’t get imported with a thorn), it got written y, which is how you got “ye olde”.
mrslt@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yes, but people also don’t generally speak today like they did back then, either.
davidagain@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They were used interchangeably in Beowolf, for example.
See this answer with plenty of authoritative references:
linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/31881