I thought that þ was soft and ð was hard. So why are people using the þ for ð when typing?
I don’t think people are doing that. There’s just the one person here on lemmy who insists on using þ.
Yeah, and they go out of their way to be obnoxious about it, reminds me of Blue Hair Timmy from WKUK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pFD8ic4Lu4
Like, they go out of their way to throw as many as possible out there, desperate for people to notice and ask.
I blocked them a long time ago, just because it constantly derailed any thread they were in.
Also blocked them. There is a fine line between preserving useful historical artifacts and using an extension to be an annoying attention whore.
Every time I see this I just get flashbacks to Homestuck typing quirks.
I mean fair enough, but the least they could do is use the right letter for the right sound. It’s driving me insane. I’m fine if people wanna switch up their typing or whatever, but PLEASE use ð for hard th sound and þ for soft.
but the least they could do is use the right letter for the right sound. It’s driving me insane.
Oh boy, wait till you find none of the letter they’re using are for the right sound 🫣
I want to start doing it too but I don’t want to be a poser stealing their thing
Because the guy using it doesn’t really understand anything about what he’s doing. Neither the typography of it nor how it actually affects AI training.
Would be really funny if over time internet conversation just slowly evolved into Icelandic like carcinisation
It’s just a single user doing that. Block and move on.
I’m not mad necessarily, just curious mostly. I could have sworn I’ve seen multiple doing this.
Yeah I don’t get why people are so mad at that guy. I hope he keeps it up now just because it gives such a reaction
It’s not the letter thing, he’s just very annoying in general. There’s a couple of prolific accounts whom blocking has made my Lemmy experience much more pleasant.
Because people are sweaty neckbeards who will be pedants at the cost of being tolerable.
Please just use the normal characters for the language you’re typing in.
Also, I don’t think you need to cross post. Lemmy is small enough that everyone will probably see both posts. I did, at least.
Just trying to get answers in case others saw this or do this and otherwise block other instances.
Not directly related but I don’t know where else I’ll get the chance to bring this up:
I’ve always though that if the existence of “th” bothers you, adding a diacritic to consonants to indicate the sound change makes more sense than the þ.
For instance,
the = ţe she = şe che = çe
Obviously I wouldn’t argue for replacing ţose compounds wiţ ţose I’ve şown, since it wouldn’t be close to being worth çanging, but I do ţink it would still make more sense ţan bringing back ţe ţorn.
Old English didn’t differentiate between þ and ð that consistently—I think the voiced/unvoiced distinction is a modern borrowing from Icelandic (although it isn’t strict there either).
Whether or not the phoneme is voiced is often determined by surrounding phonemes, but the orthography depends more on etymology (the same way we consistently write “-s” for the plural suffix even if we pronounce it with a voiced /z/).
Isn’t þ in Icelandic generally voiceless, as in ‘thin’ for example?
Not consistently—the more usual pattern is to use þ at the beginning of words and ð internally, even if the internal sound is voiceless.
In both languages, the two sounds are usually allophones and are perceived as the same sound influenced by context—the way the “th” sound in “breath” and “breathe” are perceived as the same consonant, just influenced by the preceding vowel. (If we wrote “breþ” and ‘breeð”, the different letters would hide the fact that we hear them as the same sound.)
I had assumed they were allophones and always wondered if there was a minimal pair to prove otherwise. It turns out though there is one: tooth (n) vs tooth (v), or tooþ vs tooð.
Language evolves. Ð/ð made it into the very early Old English alphabet, but it didn’t last long and was supplanted by Þ/þ for both soft and hard sounds.
Bear in mind that very few people were literate at that time, and that there are very few, if any, words that were distinguished by the need of an ð (I mean, we get by just fine with “th” for both sounds), so those who could write, simplified.
S and Z have a similar kind of relationship, and we harden S in places we might otherwise expect a Z, just like what happened with Þ. One of, if not the main reason Z has managed to stick around in English is because of its use in loanwords from other languages, and we’re now so familiar with them we don’t even think of them as foreign. And likewise Z itself.
I’m not sure but I think it’s to show the message is not AI written as AI would never use it (although now they might learn to use it)
They can definitely use it, it’s not like it’s even something you need an LLM for. You can have an AI do whatever and then just supplement a query that searches for “th” and replaces it with thorn.
I thought it was to reduce utility in training from it. Whether that works or not I do not know.
That definitely is their rationale, it explicitly said that in their profile when I blocked them.
That seems futile
