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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Thorn and edh was Re: Thou vs you
In-Reply-To: rte@elmo.lz.att.com's message of Wed, 21 Feb 1996 13:22:32 -0500
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In article <rte-2102961322320001@mac-118.lz.att.com> rte@elmo.lz.att.com
(Ralph T. Edwards) writes:

>In article <aldersonDn1qqE.HwH@netcom.com>, alderson@netcom.com wrote:

>>The mistake here is in assuming that this was something done by *early*
>>printers.  The habit of "archaizing" signs is more 19th or 20th Century than
>>early.  The spelling of "the" with a thorn was long gone by Shakespeare's
>>time, and even a 17th Century printer of English would have been hard put to
>>find a thorn among his sorts.

>Were thorn and edh ever printed?  When?  Is there any truth to the claim that
>the English printers were just too lazy to add to the castings from the
>continent?  If not, does anyone know why thorn and eth went out of fashion?
>Were they dropped fom manuscripts at the same time they were dropped from
>printing?

I'm forwarding this to comp.fonts, where authoritative answers are available;
I freely admit to being a typographic amateur who trades his linguistic
expertise for tolerance in that newsgroup.

comp.fonts readers who follow up to this should note the cross-posting...
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
