lwood: (elder futhark)
[personal profile] lwood
(a non-ongoing, non-consecutively numbered series, nicked proudly from [livejournal.com profile] 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!

Date: 2007-01-17 10:37 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] velcroswench.livejournal.com
This entry is composed of joy & win. :)

Date: 2007-01-17 11:38 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lwood.livejournal.com
Huzzah! I win at LJ!

-- Lorrie

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February 2011

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