> You mustn't forget your yoghs and your eths either Judy!

OK, here's my run-down, with the proviso that some people on poetryetc may 
want to challenge what I say / add to it / clarify.

As petc doesn't allow visuals, I'll include the Wiki URLs for the actual 
appearance of the letters, and for more detail than I'll be providing here. 
(Also, Wiki may not say the same thing as me, so caveat emptor.)

THORN        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29

ETH            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth

YOGH        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh

            (There's also, of course, WYNN --  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynn -- and ASH, but let's not go there.  The 
following -- http://acunix.wheatonma.edu/mdrout/GrammarBook2007/ch2.html --  
gives a run-down on thorn, eth, yogh, wynn, and ash which is probably 
clearer than what I say in this post.)

These three letters existed in Old English orthography but weren't part of 
the printer's fonts which arrived in the late 14thC.  I'm not sure quite 
when they drop out of manuscript texts -- perhaps Candice would know?

The Thorn and Eth (the latter sometimes called the slashed-D) both 
represented the same sound -- "th", both voiced and voiceless, in Modern 
English.  Orthographically, they were positional variants, rather than 
representing different sounds -- you'd (usually) get the Thorn at the 
beginning of a word and the Eth in the middle and the end.  [But I'm 
prepared to be corrected on this.]

This leads to Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe, where the "Y" in "Ye" is a 
"transformation" of the original Thorn, and was never (originally) 
pronounced as anything other than "The".  (Dunno when this particular 
strangeness begius -- it was never part of the standard substitution in 
English printed texts, as "Z" was for the Yogh character among medieval 
Scottish printers.)

Yogh presents the opposite problem -- in old English, it represented two 
separate sounds, either "j" (as in "jar") or "g" (as in "girl").  Thus the 
problematics of the first line of Beowulf:

        Hwat!  We 3ar-danas in 3ar-dagum ...

Are these gear Danes or year Danes?

The Yogh Problem persists to the present day, where the proper name, 
orthographically represented as "Menzies", is [or should be] pronounced 
<mingus>.

Hope this is (at least partly) clear ...

Now to try to work out why my ISP (bt) insists on relegating certain 
poetryetc posts -- most notably from Andrew Burke, sometimes dave 
bircumshaw, and most recently Judy with her new email address-- to the 
Bulk/Spam folder, and doesn't upload them to Outlook Express.

R.

>> If I may piggyback here a query to Robin re Ye Olde Six Bells Pub in 
>> Horley,
>> Surrey:
>>
>> Please xplain that "thorn" or "wynne" or wotever alphabeletter begins 
>> "Ye".
>>  My kidhood friends and I in the USA useta refer to the sweet fake-old
>> American shops as "Yee Oldee Ice Cream Shoppee"----mocking those 
>> spellings
>> that were as mysteriously passed along to us as that damned droop-tailed
>> "s"!

' ... that damned droop-tailed "s" ' -- I presume by this you mean the 
long-s, which looks more like an "f" than an "s" <g> -- is a different 
issue.

<<
The long, medial or descending s (?) is a form of the minuscule letter 's' 
formerly used where 's' occurred in the middle or at the beginning of a 
word, for example ?infulne?s ("sinfulness"). The modern letterform was 
called the terminal or short s.
>>
            http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

In this case, the two manuscript representations of the "s" sound *are 
retained in (some) early printed texts in their long and short "s" forms.

Had to look that up!

R-endit.