Comment on Why are people using the "þ" character?
davidagain@lemmy.world 1 day agoIn 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 14 hours ago
Yes, but people also don’t generally speak today like they did back then, either.
davidagain@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
They were used interchangeably in Beowolf, for example.
See this answer with plenty of authoritative references:
linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/31881