Just thorn? Or eth also? Old English, like Icelandic to this day, had two letters denoting two different pronunciations that we now write with the pseudo-digraph th. The complication of modern English is that the contribution of other languages has multiplied the pronunciations that we represent with this pair of letters. To make any phonetic sense, one would want a separate letter to represent each phoneme. English may be too much of a mongrel tongue to support such systematic phonemic representation.

No, not eth too, just thorn. Actually, not really thorn either. Merely a new single character condensing the "th." I agree, English is too much of a mongrel language to start niggling such phonimic details (lest we end up with 40 more characters in our alphabet). Since we don't establish such distinctions now with our current usage of the "th" combination I see no reason to start. I'm thinking more along the lines of how the English employed the "Y" character as a pseudo-thorn as a space saver.

Certainly not a critical typographic issue. Just a little design project I've flirted with for personal entertainment off and on over the years.

dm

Merely a new single character condensing the "th."

but which "th"? the voiced or the unvoiced? i think that's the whole of what John was getting at... that if you're going to do one, you should do the other. and if you're going to start with "th" then why stop there? how bout one for "ch" and "sh" ad infinitum.

Wuns yu start asking wy inglish duz not hav a rashnel sistem of speling, yu very kwikly hit a brik worl. For historikel reezonz wee ar stuk with a mes, in wich the absens ov a thorn karakter iz the leest ov our difikulteez. Peesmeel introdukshon ov wun mor leter leevz so many mor seareeus problemz that it duzznt seem wurth dooing.

I understand your point, and it is a good one. That's why I would limit it to just a "th" character. The English scribes and engravers used one for a couple hundred years without feeling the need to produce a character for every sound. Though I must admit that having an "sh" character is appealing to me too.

No doubt a good diacritical system in English would be a much better implementation. Especially in regard to things like names which in English can be almost totally subjective in spelling & pronuciation.

I guess what I'm driving at is: If we were to adopt a new character representing "th" what would it look like? The "Y" substitution worked, but lends itself to confusion. The odoption of the original thorn doesn't blend well with roman characters. A straight ligature doesn't savve space; tho a condensed ligature (such as with &) would. Something that was familiar would lend itself to quicker adoption. So what should it look like?

dm

Especially since people are much more interested in using text to express their emotions without actually having to go to the trouble of finding the words to do so. ATF's abortive interrobang must have been one of the first efforts but technology prevented its adoption then even as it would have done now. What has succeeded are the emoticons that can be constructed from existing characters. Personally, I don't like them and don't even know how to read them but chacun etc. My objection is to any typographical character that interferes with the overall aesthetics of the typeface. Thus I faintly dislike the German ch simply on the grounds that the spacing between the characters is too tight, and I deplore the beloved Icelandic eth on the grounds that it has evolved into a shape that cannot be formally related to any other character in a font. In this respect, the specifications for the eth are precisely analogous to the original formal specifications for the Euro symbol: there was nothing you could do with it, unless you ignored the specification.

In considering the standard PS set of characters, the glyph most in need of current reform is the eth, which sticks out like a sore thumb in every design where Icelandic taste is consulted. The only designer I can think of who was occasionally courageous (or sneaky) enough to put a stop to this aesthetic rot is Zapf.

I think the EU should ban the character. Having first, one might hope, sent the Blairs to Elba.

Another reason to reform the eth is that it is the character the typeface designer spends the most time on with the least result. What has this irascible race done to warrant such attention?

Designing an eth that both harmonises with the specific typeface and conforms to the normative form of the letter is often a challenge, but there is a great deal of satisfaction if one pulls it off. Often, the eth does not harmonise with the typeface very well, which I think is the source of Bill's dissatisfaction with the letter. But it seems to me that throwing out the normative form of the letter is no more satisfactory a solution than sticking any old eth in a typeface. Most eths are not very good because the people who draw them have not spent any time writing them: they look at the eth as a difficult design problem -- and as a chore --, and not as a letterform.

The eth is a letter that originates in a time when the Latin script was written in a particular way with particular tool, and in a particular cultural milieu. Anyone who has seen the Beowulf manuscript in the British Library will know just how natural this letter looks in its original context. The problem of the eth for contemporary type designers is that we are obliged, for reasons of character set support, to include it in typefaces in styles that evolved in Italy, France and other parts of continental Europe, and in which the Icelandic language was never set until the 20th Century. The ductus of these type styles typically differs from that needed to make the letter eth, which means that one needs to rely on weight and proportion to harmonise forms, much as one does when trying to harmonise Greek and Latin designs without compromising the authentic forms of either script.

The eth is a kind of time traveller: a visitor from an earlier version of our alphabet. That seems to me to be an interesting sort of challenge, and not something that one should deal with crudely. The past, as the saying goes, is a foreign country, so I tend to approach the eth with much the same strategy as I approach non-Latin scripts.


What has this irascible race done to warrant such attention?

Icelanders? They joined NATO and allowed the US to build air bases in their country. The strategic importance of Iceland in NATO during the cold war guaranteed their alphabet representation in the ANSI character set for Western Europe.

I tend to be conservative when linguistic matters come up, but I'd wholeheartedly welcome the revival of thorn and edh in English. It'll probably never happen, but that shouldn't dissuade designers and typographers from trying to sneak these letters in once in a while.

One other thing: modern use of edh isn't strictly Icelandic. Faroese also uses it (but thorn is absent).

>What has this irascible race done to warrant such attention?

They're a proper independent country from way back. Never mind the politics, consider the map; you can't get more Western European than Iceland.

Are there Western European countries that missed out on getting their characters into the ANSI set?

Wales didn't get some of their accented letters in there.

T

Just do what the sceintists and engineers do when they run our of roman letters: use greek ones. How about good old Theta?

I think the EU should ban the character.

Bill, that wouldn’t do any good. Iceland is not part of the European Union :-)

__
www.typeoff.de

This in an interesting converstation. Especially since I am an Icelander. Here, in Iceland, the thorn and eth are natural characters of the alphabet. The two characters pop out quite frequently and are seldomly left out of a sentence. There have often been discussions about discontinuing the everyday use of them and replace them by “th” and “d”. This has never been enforced though and probably never will. Icelanders are conservative people and love their language heritage.

Despite the nation’s love of those characters they have unfortunately presented a lot of problems in all kinds of areas over the years. For example Icelanders have, up until this day, had to patch their operating system to get the Icelandic characters right and we still have some problems with them in particular software programs.

Gunnlaugur SE Briem is and Icelandic type designer and on his website he talks a little about how to design the thorn and eth in a right way. Take a look: http://briem.ismennt.is/2/2.11/index.htm

In my typographical compositions the thorn and the eth don’t bother me as much as the accented capital letters like “Á” and “É”. They always seem to be in the way somehow and misalign with the cap height.

Ragnar Freyr
www.onrushdesign.com
www.formislandia.com