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Reasons You Know You're Me, #786:
(a non-ongoing, non-consecutively numbered series, nicked proudly from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
camwyn)
While on the several sundry shuttles that get me to the Mad Scientists' Home, I espy one of many signs promoting the new Third Street Light Rail, which will be known as the "T" for "Third".
"But Third doesn't start with a 'T', it starts with a Þ!"*
Imagine, if you will, a City by the Bay spreckled with Þ's--yes, gentles, San Francisco would be sticking its tongue out at you. Neener!
But no, instead we flush several centuries of West Norse and Anglo-Saxon typography right down the drain and settle on T.
I blame the Normans. Silly Normans...
-- Lorrie 8-Þ
* - Note for the Orthographically Challenged: Þ, and its lowercase partner in crime þ is a character known as "thorn" or "thurs" (giant/Jotun/etc), depending on which rune poem you're citing--in HTML, the Anglo-Saxon 'thorn' wins out...for a letter only in modern use in Icelandic, go figure. It may represent either of the two phonemes that in Modern English are relegated to the low-rent dyad† 'th': the voiceless interdental fricative demonstrated above (third), or the voiced dental fricative of the 'th' in 'the'. In Icelandic, it's only for the voiceless version; the voiced gets the also stylish, also underused eth, spelled Ð and ð.
†‡ - Dyad. It means pair, for when those times "pair" is insufficiently snooty. Don't blame me, blame Edred Thorsson.
‡ - My footnotes can so have footnotes of their own! See!
camwyn)While on the several sundry shuttles that get me to the Mad Scientists' Home, I espy one of many signs promoting the new Third Street Light Rail, which will be known as the "T" for "Third".
"But Third doesn't start with a 'T', it starts with a Þ!"*
Imagine, if you will, a City by the Bay spreckled with Þ's--yes, gentles, San Francisco would be sticking its tongue out at you. Neener!
But no, instead we flush several centuries of West Norse and Anglo-Saxon typography right down the drain and settle on T.
I blame the Normans. Silly Normans...
-- Lorrie 8-Þ
* - Note for the Orthographically Challenged: Þ, and its lowercase partner in crime þ is a character known as "thorn" or "thurs" (giant/Jotun/etc), depending on which rune poem you're citing--in HTML, the Anglo-Saxon 'thorn' wins out...for a letter only in modern use in Icelandic, go figure. It may represent either of the two phonemes that in Modern English are relegated to the low-rent dyad† 'th': the voiceless interdental fricative demonstrated above (third), or the voiced dental fricative of the 'th' in 'the'. In Icelandic, it's only for the voiceless version; the voiced gets the also stylish, also underused eth, spelled Ð and ð.
†‡ - Dyad. It means pair, for when those times "pair" is insufficiently snooty. Don't blame me, blame Edred Thorsson.
‡ - My footnotes can so have footnotes of their own! See!
no subject
no subject
*bows*
-- Lorrie