Eth

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Eth (Ð, ð; also spelled edh or eð) is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a D with a line partially through the vertical stroke. The lower case resembles an insular d with a line through the top.

The letter originated in Irish writing (Freeborn 1992, 24) 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.

In Icelandic, ð represents a voiced dental fricative like th in English "them", but it never appears as the first letter of a word. The name of the letter is pronounced eθ, i.e., voiceless, unless followed by a vowel. It has also been labeled an "interdental fricative."^[1]
This Icelandic representation can be used for "द" in देवनागरी Devnagari.

In Faroese, ð isn't assigned to any particular phoneme and appears mostly 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 [ɡ]. 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 is introduced for etymological reasons.

In the orthography for Elfdalian, the ð represents a voiced dental fricative like th in English "them", and it follows d in the alphabet.

In Old English, ð (referred to as ðæt by the Anglo-Saxons) 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;^{[citation needed]} þ survived longer, ultimately being replaced by the modern digraph th by about 1500.

The ð is also used by some in written Welsh to represent the letter 'dd' (the voiced dental fricative).^{[citation needed]}

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 /ɛð/. (The IPA symbol for the voiceless dental fricative is θ.)

A handwritten ð is visible.

Contents 1 Computer encoding 2 Miscellaneous 3 See also 4 Notes and references 5 External links

[edit] Computer encoding

• 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.

• On Unix-like systems such as Linux it can be entered with the Compose key plus d and h or D and H for the uppercase version when using ISO8859-based locales or Compose key plus d and h or D and h for uppercase version when using UTF-8-based locales.

• Similarly, one can type edh on Mac OS X by activating the US Extended keyboard layout and holding the option key while pressing d for the lowercase and shift+option+d for the uppercase.

• In Microsoft Windows, to produce the uppercase letter, hold down the Alt and type 0208 on the numeric keypad or type Alt 0240 for lowercase. The US-International keyboard layout allows the letter to be entered by holding AltGr and pressing the letter "d."

[edit] Miscellaneous

• The letter ð is sometimes used in mathematics and engineering textbooks as a symbol for a spin-weighted partial derivative. This operator gives rise to spin-weighted spherical harmonics.
• The modern Greek letter delta (Δ, δ) has, in general, the same phonetic value, and ð is the only Latin alphabet letter faithfully representing delta's phonetic value. (In Ancient Greek delta represented a d sound).
• The symbol is mentioned in the Rush song By-Tor and the Snow Dog in the first verse:

Prince By-Tor takes the cavern to the North light,
The sign of Eth is rising in the air.

[edit] See also

• D with stroke
• African D
• Insular script

[edit] Notes and references

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

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ð

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

The Basic modern Latin alphabet
Aa	Bb	Cc	Dd	Ee	Ff	Gg	Hh	Ii	Jj	Kk	Ll	Mm	Nn	Oo	Pp	Qq	Rr	Ss	Tt	Uu	Vv	Ww	Xx	Yy	Zz
history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters • ISO/IEC 646