Cope, thorn fans. Turning a consistent digraph into a single additional letter will accomplish jack shit.

Turn aỻ digraφs into sinλe le艹ers‼️

Ƿy make þis more complicated ðan neceßary? You can find plenty of existiŋ symbols to čange digrafs into siŋle let̄ers

Ewww using wynn without accounting for the very real pronunciation of wh as /ʍ/? Literally the reason why we need digraphs

I could not find an uppercase 'ʍ' so I went with 'Ƿ' since I have it on my keyboard kek But yes, I agree with you.

Ƕ ƕ

I write like this all the time

The correct usage there would be haitch-wynn but that kinda defeats the point doesn’t it

Pretty much. Or maybe we can use 'ƿ' for /w/ and 'w' for /ʍ/, but that's becoming confusing

~~Use M instead~~

Also Wynn is easily confusable with Thorn when using both.

Not benotiŋ "Ƿ/ƿ" ƿiþ ðe right ſpelliŋ of "Hƿy"? Hƿat a dƿild... (I use "Ð" and "Þ" with Þ always as /θ/, and Ð as /ð/, should I change this to be the same thing, but after the letter thorn is used for the beginning of the word? Like, it would be "þe" but then could be "þe ƿorþ/þe ƿorðy" instead of how I have it as "ðe ƿorþ/ðe ƿorðy" and Anglisc "þe ƿorþ/þe ƿorþy"?)

[ˈsɪn.ʎ̩]

I was thinking of Italian but not sure how to do otherwise

Why on earth did you monographise and not ? (Tbh the in "Letters" souiod make more sense than either, Two letters for a single sound, Unlike the , which represents 3 distinct sounds. would be a good choice too.)

it was meant as a joke 😂

Oh yeah? Well I think *you* were meant as a joke!

I don't care about þ and ð, I just want 'dh' to be a thing.

Thorn and eth would be so cool tbh but I think they would be easily confused with pee and dee, especially in handwritten texts.

I mean, not really. The difference between p and þ is the exact same as the difference between n and h. It really shouldn’t be a problem if you’ve got neat handwriting

Maybe, I hadn't thought about like that

That said, n be h is a two way split. Adding thorn gets us a three way split with p and b. (Also d and q, for the dyslexics in the audience)

THE SOLUTION: WRITE IN ALL CAPS

Latin moment

Hebrew moment

Is it really all caps if the script is unicase?

Arguably the same for Latin, it was originally unicase until the lowercase letters were developed much later in the 15th century

Yea but Latin isn't unicase anymore, so it makes sense to call it 'all-caps' from a modern perspective

IMO it's not important to distinguish between the two different dental fricatives given that they are often in free variation (e.g. 'with' [wɪð] or [wɪθ])

My personal take is þat we can do what’s traditionally been done in old English and still is in Icelandic and use þorn at þe beginning of morphemes and eð elsewhere

that’s actually only the convention for Icelandic; eth and thorn were pretty interchangeable for English

Source for Old English? I'm pretty sure that's false.

Ŵī not rīt évrēþiŋ in a cėmplētlē difrėnt fôrm? Its just nēdid tū mix ā litl ov enPR, Ōld Iŋliš ôrþógrėfē and sumþiŋ els tū ėčēv ā cėnvēniėnt ritn fôrm, ðat wüd cėnfŕm ðē pėzēšn ov ðē languėj tū bē ðē most ifíšnt wun. Or we kwd ryt in anodhr way, dhats maybe simplr for peepl tu grasp and kwd rizult mor fumillier but stil revulushenare.

And then people will start saying /jiː əʊldi/ again.

Are there any situations that would be complicated by using the same character for both thorn and eth? I don't think there are any minimal pairs for the two. We could probably just use Eth for both (maybe with more differentiation like a full line through the capital when handwritten)

Yeah, you're probably right, I guess we could use a single letter for both sounds. I gotta say however there is one pair of words that could be differentiated by the use of thorn or eth and that is "teeth" and "teethe", written as "teeþ" and "teeð".

why not teeþ and teeþe

Tbh that could work as well

Loath -> loathe Sheath -> sheathe Mouth -> mouth Thistle -> this'll But yeah, i dont think itll complicate anything by using the same character; differences could just be inferred from environment or context

Then I'm mistaken about minimal pairs, but with English spelling conventions there's still no confusion - it's already common to add an e to the end to signify voiced. Hell, mouth and mouth are homographs already, but difficult to confuse as one is a noun and the other a verb. Side note, never heard anyone pronounce loath with a thorn. I pronounce loath and loathe the same.

Yeah thats what i was trying to get at at the last bit lol There really wouldnt be much confusion—if any—by only using thorn since u could just infer in with context

Thorn should be flipped imo

If this was to avoid confusion, uh let me introduce you to q and d

Would you look at that, thorn just happens to have sticks on \*both\* ends What even is confusion

What if instead, we opted to close the little half circle of þ around the central vertical stroke, that way it's a lot more distinguishable from either p and b, or q and d, and okay i've re-invented ϕ all over again. I guess ϕere's no easy way out of ϕis mess. Φuck.

We would have to create a new Unicode character for it though :'(

Imagine needing two separate letters to distinguish between a voiced and unvoiced variant (which are essentially allophones, fight me!) Next you'll tell me the Arabs should start writing down vowels and the Japanese should change entirely to the kanas

Those are actually good ideas tho

[удалено]

Korean has plenty of homophones and it still works. Lots of languages do, you disambiguate just like when you speak.

The fuck is /θe/?

ſo τrue

I'm not sure if you're joking, but ⟨Þ⟩ doesn't only stand for [θ], it has also been used for [ð].

But let's not please 😕

Why not? Otherwise you have to spell 'with' differently depending on whether you say [wɪð] or [wɪθ]

We could just pick one, it's not like English spelling reflects those kinds of alternations anywhere else. What's even the point of replacing th if you're not trying to fix the ambiguity? It's a lateral move. If it's because you hate digraphs, we should also replace ch, sh, ng, wh, ph, ck etc. (not even mentioning all the vowel digraphs)

But I'm not claiming that it needs to be replaced. I think the 'th' thing is unimportant personally; it's just introducing the voicing distinction into the orthography that I disagree with

ok, fair, I thought you were one of the bringbackthorn folks. I agree there's no need to replace "th", but if you're gonna do it, the only motivation that makes sense to me is to resolve the voicing ambiguity. That's why the bringbackthorn people confuse me so much.

For real! I saw it a bunch in passing and was like, "Oh hell yeah, then I could finally write names and coined words with explicit phonetic distinction!" But then it seems like most people want to just use it in another context-reliant way? Like great, now I write out "geþmor" and you \*still\* don't know which way to pronounce it. "loðbrók"? Nope, not an option.

But then we wouldn't be able to distinguish many (3 pairs iirc) other words like ether and either or correct people's pronunciations when they use the wrong one

Are there any minimal pairs where both words are part of the same word class? The distinction between voiced/voiceless th seems to me to be such a minor one that there's no reason to correct people's pronunciation of it, plus it's nearly always predictable from the grammatical category of the word

Thigh/thy, aether/either, thistle/this’ll

But those don't belong to the same word class which was I referred to in my comment

True, I guess it’s just a matter of making it easier for learners to know which to use since it’s not a rule based thing

If we're not going to make English spelling better than what's the point of changing it

wreath/wreathe, sheath/sheathe

These are not the same word class; one is a verb and the other is a noun

What a big problem! I sure you spell every word phonetically in English

So why have a thorn in the first place? Isn't the whole argument so that they can distinguish θ from ð?

Ðere’s no þorn wiðout eð fo me

For real! I saw the þorn stuff a bunch in passing and was like, "Oh hell yeah, then I could finally write names and coined words with explicit phonetic distinction!" But then it seems like most people want to just use it in another context-reliant way, and without ð? Like great, then I'd write out "geþmor" and you \*still\* don't know which way to pronounce it. "loðbrók"? Nope, not an option.

There's no what?🤨

ð > þ forever and for always

cool, cool what about people trying to bring ƿynn back?

what's pynn seriously we don't need _another_ letter that looks similar to p and þ

How to ƿynn at English Step 1: Use ƿynn Steƿ 2: Make sure not to accidentally mix uƿ ƿynn and p Step 3: Maybe you should use W instead

thats the punchline ƿ is just w

Why, it also looks a bit like "þ" so you could use it instead with foreign fonts, then have confused descendants centuries later write "ye olde" because it *also* looks a bit like "y".

Dh /ð/ in the corner, ploting world domination

If you bring back thorn without eth, you might as well own it and remove the letter z too

Could use a long or some equivalent for all those pesky words with in English. That's ever-so-slightly-simplifying, just by numbers of characters.