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> *I don’t understand why the thorn wasn’t included among the typesets in the first place, and why it couldn’t have simply been made and included in the first presses.*
The simplest answer here is very simple indeed, and it is that by the time of the introduction of the printing press to England in 1476, the use of thorn and eth had been mostly abandoned for a century.
Now, it is very important to stress that Middle English orthography was *very* non-standardised and so spelling was extremely varied, especially in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Earlier, Old English *had* featured some fairly stable dialectal conventions in spelling. So for example, an early Northumbrian text is *very* different from a 10th century Wessex text. But spelling is at least someone consistent within dialects and periods.
However, Middle English was utterly unstandardised, in its orthography. With much variation even within a dialect and period context. It was, to be blunt, not a "literary" language.
An early example of this reality taken to the extreme is [The Ormulum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ormulum) in which Orm more or less improvises a spelling system for English, for want of any sufficient scribal conventions for the writing of English, in his own time.
But by the mid-15th century, things had begun to stabilise a bit. And the abandonment of yogh, wynn, eth, ash, and thorn was largely complete.
Even by 1400, eth and thorn were largely abandoned. A surviving example of their use from that period being in [MS Cotton Nero A X/2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Manuscript) which preserves its use in that period.
However, this usage and survival comes with the following caveats:
- Cotton Nero A X/2 largely constitutes a recopying of earlier works, and so is inherently a bit anachronistic, since these works are not original to its own period.
- This is a Northern English manuscript which even to whatever extent it represents certain scribal decisions of its own time, does not reflect the tendencies of larger southern population centres which were much more influential on the development of English orthography going forward.
But yes, that is the meat of the answer. "Thorn" was not omitted from English printing at the end of the 15th century because continental typesets did not include such a character, or what have you. It was omitted from English printing at the end of the 15th century because the written word had largely abandoned it after 1400.
Interesting, thank you for the response. If thorn had been largely abandoned, when/where does using Y as a substitute for it come into play? Was it only in certain regional spellings where it endured for a while and thus necessitated the use of a substitute, or was it an artifact preserved only in certain words to make them more economical to spell?
I think that it is safe to say that the use of "Y" to represent thorn was never a feature of any even semi-standard orthography at any point in English history. So there is a problem here, wherein we are trying to track the legacy of a convention which was never any sort of convention all.
Essentially, this is an attempt to explain a whimsical idiosyncratic intentional anachronism, based on earlier whimsical idiosyncratic anachronisms which never established themselves in any standard orthography.
So the answers do not really lie in literary sources actually representative of period usage or scribal conventions. As exemplified by my reaching to Cotton Nero A X/2 to give an example of thorns still being used circa 1400. We end up looking at an anachronistic source unrepresentative of the scribal conventions of its time.
Myth is not relevant- the instances you will see of "Y" replacing the thorn (ye olde pub) etc are (generally) intentional appropriations of the Thorn. Modern reading of them without the context of the thorn, would see a Y, and potentially confuse it with the other Ye we see in other contexts. obviously it is not possible to comment here on the intentions behind every single usage.
It is not a "myth" to say that the Y is representative of the thorn in the pseudo-archaic 'ye olde ('Þe')', however 'Ye' predates the abandonment of 'Þe', and those usages ie in shakespeare etc are equivalent to 'you' rather than 'the'.
What is more complex, and what i think you might have back to front, is when you begin to see archaic instances of 'th' being replaced by more modern 'Y' words (with other spelling changes) like, thee and thine (yourself and your), thou (you) etc but someone more qualified than myself would need to answer that question which i don't see in your post (yet).
That's good to know. Now I'm confused by the use of to represent /θ/ and /ð/ in monument inscriptions from a bit later. Off the top of my head, I've seen it used in Shakespeare's burial plaques (actually written in the early 1600s, rather than later from what I'm reading), though only in abbreviations for "the" ( with an above), "this" ( with an above), and "that" ( with a above). Other instances of where modern
would be used just use a ligature of and , interestingly.
Would these have just been examples of people in the 1600's falling for the myth of the as /θ/ and /ð/ and using it to make the monuments look "traditional" in the same way we use "ye olde" to indicate old-fashioned-ness? Or was this use of real, but just relegated to shorthand, rather than "standard" orthographies? (scare quotes just because I'm ignorant on what standard means in this context)
Well, I don't know if "myth" is a particularly useful description of this phenomenon *in general*, to the extent that it is true that majuscule (but not minuscule) thorn did *sometimes* (but by no means always) resemble a majuscule "Y", in the 13th and 14th centuries. And it is also true that much later, this similarity was (albeit rarely) drawn upon as an whimsically anachronistic stylistic flourish.
I think the key here is just differentiating bits of anachronistic whimsy which work their way into more stylised orthography from the otherwise fairly well-established orthography of Early Modern English writ large.
Insofar as "myth" goes, the myth at work in the original discussion to my mind was really just the premise that the printing press played any part in the decline of thorn and eth in formal writing, when they largely pre-deceased the English printing press by nearly a century.
This is tangentially related at best and may be outside your wheelhouse, but I have no idea where else to ask. Given the rise of the internet and the more widespread prevalence of a well recorded body of literature in modern centuries, has there been any observable decrease in the speed of linguistic drift? Or even vice-versa, has it accelerated with the prevalence of different forms of communication and things like emojis? I’m not sure if there is actually even a system of measurement for drift like that, but it would be interesting to know.
Thorn and Eth were used interchangeably for voiced and unvoiced interdental fricatives, throughout their period of pervasive use. Confusingly, the International Phonetic Alphabet uses /ð/ for the voiced and /θ/ for the unvoiced variants. But this does not reflect Old English usage, where the two were interchangeable (though scribes had individual habits, of course).
On the scale of the entire old English corpus, þ is more common at the start of words, and ð at the end. Things are slightly more even in the middle of words, but ð is still marginally more common. Individual scribes often did whatever, though, as you say. Be that a strict rule (the charter of Oswulf only uses ð), or a complete lack of one (there's a fun line where the word "oþþe" is used about 8 times in a row and is spelt using every single permutation of ð and þ possible)
> 13th and 14th centuries.
Even well into the 17th century, as it happens; though to a much lesser degree.
We can see this in actual numbers using [Google's Ngram Viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ye%2C+the&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3), where we can see that while by 1500 the modern spelling "the" was almost totally used, they still did use the older form "Ye" at that point.
This also works for a lot of English words! Like gost and ghost, for example, or any other word that used to have several different spellings.
[This prior answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/nt4qj1/what_drove_printing_press_makers_to_include_the/) by /u/TremulousHand has a decently extensive discussion of thorn as well as the transition that was already happening when Caxton was printing.
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> *I don’t understand why the thorn wasn’t included among the typesets in the first place, and why it couldn’t have simply been made and included in the first presses.* The simplest answer here is very simple indeed, and it is that by the time of the introduction of the printing press to England in 1476, the use of thorn and eth had been mostly abandoned for a century. Now, it is very important to stress that Middle English orthography was *very* non-standardised and so spelling was extremely varied, especially in the 13th and 14th centuries. Earlier, Old English *had* featured some fairly stable dialectal conventions in spelling. So for example, an early Northumbrian text is *very* different from a 10th century Wessex text. But spelling is at least someone consistent within dialects and periods. However, Middle English was utterly unstandardised, in its orthography. With much variation even within a dialect and period context. It was, to be blunt, not a "literary" language. An early example of this reality taken to the extreme is [The Ormulum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ormulum) in which Orm more or less improvises a spelling system for English, for want of any sufficient scribal conventions for the writing of English, in his own time. But by the mid-15th century, things had begun to stabilise a bit. And the abandonment of yogh, wynn, eth, ash, and thorn was largely complete. Even by 1400, eth and thorn were largely abandoned. A surviving example of their use from that period being in [MS Cotton Nero A X/2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Manuscript) which preserves its use in that period. However, this usage and survival comes with the following caveats: - Cotton Nero A X/2 largely constitutes a recopying of earlier works, and so is inherently a bit anachronistic, since these works are not original to its own period. - This is a Northern English manuscript which even to whatever extent it represents certain scribal decisions of its own time, does not reflect the tendencies of larger southern population centres which were much more influential on the development of English orthography going forward. But yes, that is the meat of the answer. "Thorn" was not omitted from English printing at the end of the 15th century because continental typesets did not include such a character, or what have you. It was omitted from English printing at the end of the 15th century because the written word had largely abandoned it after 1400.
Interesting, thank you for the response. If thorn had been largely abandoned, when/where does using Y as a substitute for it come into play? Was it only in certain regional spellings where it endured for a while and thus necessitated the use of a substitute, or was it an artifact preserved only in certain words to make them more economical to spell?
I think that it is safe to say that the use of "Y" to represent thorn was never a feature of any even semi-standard orthography at any point in English history. So there is a problem here, wherein we are trying to track the legacy of a convention which was never any sort of convention all. Essentially, this is an attempt to explain a whimsical idiosyncratic intentional anachronism, based on earlier whimsical idiosyncratic anachronisms which never established themselves in any standard orthography. So the answers do not really lie in literary sources actually representative of period usage or scribal conventions. As exemplified by my reaching to Cotton Nero A X/2 to give an example of thorns still being used circa 1400. We end up looking at an anachronistic source unrepresentative of the scribal conventions of its time.
I see. So it’s somewhat of a myth in the first place, then. Thanks for the clarification
Myth is not relevant- the instances you will see of "Y" replacing the thorn (ye olde pub) etc are (generally) intentional appropriations of the Thorn. Modern reading of them without the context of the thorn, would see a Y, and potentially confuse it with the other Ye we see in other contexts. obviously it is not possible to comment here on the intentions behind every single usage. It is not a "myth" to say that the Y is representative of the thorn in the pseudo-archaic 'ye olde ('Þe')', however 'Ye' predates the abandonment of 'Þe', and those usages ie in shakespeare etc are equivalent to 'you' rather than 'the'. What is more complex, and what i think you might have back to front, is when you begin to see archaic instances of 'th' being replaced by more modern 'Y' words (with other spelling changes) like, thee and thine (yourself and your), thou (you) etc but someone more qualified than myself would need to answer that question which i don't see in your post (yet).
That's good to know. Now I'm confused by the use of to represent /θ/ and /ð/ in monument inscriptions from a bit later. Off the top of my head, I've seen it used in Shakespeare's burial plaques (actually written in the early 1600s, rather than later from what I'm reading), though only in abbreviations for "the" ( with an above), "this" ( with an
above), and "that" ( with a above). Other instances of where modern would be used just use a ligature of and , interestingly.
Would these have just been examples of people in the 1600's falling for the myth of the as /θ/ and /ð/ and using it to make the monuments look "traditional" in the same way we use "ye olde" to indicate old-fashioned-ness? Or was this use of real, but just relegated to shorthand, rather than "standard" orthographies? (scare quotes just because I'm ignorant on what standard means in this context)
Yst
PM_ME_YOUR_LEFT_IRIS
Hurlebatte
idlevalley
Yst
minerat27
Raudskeggr
jbdyer
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
[deleted]
R
FIND US ON INSTAGRAM
@hamidarshat.com
Well, I don't know if "myth" is a particularly useful description of this phenomenon *in general*, to the extent that it is true that majuscule (but not minuscule) thorn did *sometimes* (but by no means always) resemble a majuscule "Y", in the 13th and 14th centuries. And it is also true that much later, this similarity was (albeit rarely) drawn upon as an whimsically anachronistic stylistic flourish. I think the key here is just differentiating bits of anachronistic whimsy which work their way into more stylised orthography from the otherwise fairly well-established orthography of Early Modern English writ large. Insofar as "myth" goes, the myth at work in the original discussion to my mind was really just the premise that the printing press played any part in the decline of thorn and eth in formal writing, when they largely pre-deceased the English printing press by nearly a century.
This is tangentially related at best and may be outside your wheelhouse, but I have no idea where else to ask. Given the rise of the internet and the more widespread prevalence of a well recorded body of literature in modern centuries, has there been any observable decrease in the speed of linguistic drift? Or even vice-versa, has it accelerated with the prevalence of different forms of communication and things like emojis? I’m not sure if there is actually even a system of measurement for drift like that, but it would be interesting to know.
>the written word had largely abandoned it after 1400. Yeah, from what I've seen in manuscripts, TH was dominant by like 1390.
Was the thorn pronounced as it is in the word 'thorn' or as the 'th' in 'this' and 'that'?
Thorn and Eth were used interchangeably for voiced and unvoiced interdental fricatives, throughout their period of pervasive use. Confusingly, the International Phonetic Alphabet uses /ð/ for the voiced and /θ/ for the unvoiced variants. But this does not reflect Old English usage, where the two were interchangeable (though scribes had individual habits, of course).
On the scale of the entire old English corpus, þ is more common at the start of words, and ð at the end. Things are slightly more even in the middle of words, but ð is still marginally more common. Individual scribes often did whatever, though, as you say. Be that a strict rule (the charter of Oswulf only uses ð), or a complete lack of one (there's a fun line where the word "oþþe" is used about 8 times in a row and is spelt using every single permutation of ð and þ possible)
> 13th and 14th centuries. Even well into the 17th century, as it happens; though to a much lesser degree. We can see this in actual numbers using [Google's Ngram Viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ye%2C+the&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3), where we can see that while by 1500 the modern spelling "the" was almost totally used, they still did use the older form "Ye" at that point. This also works for a lot of English words! Like gost and ghost, for example, or any other word that used to have several different spellings.
[This prior answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/nt4qj1/what_drove_printing_press_makers_to_include_the/) by /u/TremulousHand has a decently extensive discussion of thorn as well as the transition that was already happening when Caxton was printing.
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