AN AUTOPSY OF THORN<\/p>\n
Although much scholarly ink has been spilled on the topic of changes in spoken English over the centuries, precious little has been put to paper on the topic of mutations in the orthography, and even less about the phasing in and out of particular characters. In particular, the letter thorn, which started out as a representation of the sound in modern English modeled by the \u201cth\u201d, has had little or no attention paid to it. The question is, why would English adopt this letter into the otherwise Roman alphabet, only to lose it a couple centuries later?
\nThe first step toward answering this question will be to look at the dates during which thorn was used. These can be established fairly easily by examining texts, so as to find its first appearances and its final appearances in the English language. Once these are known, examining the culture and language of the time should be indicative of the rough context in which the thorn was preserved; once these have been established, I would only need to find a set of factors that were lost at roughly the same as the thorn in order to come to a conclusion as to its cause of death, as it were.<\/p>\n
Sources:
\nNevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg. Historical Sociolinguistics, Hong Kong: Pearson Education Limited, 2003.<\/p>\n
Smith, Jeremy J. An Historical Study of English: Function, Form, and Change. New York: Routledge, 1996.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AN AUTOPSY OF THORN Although much scholarly ink has been spilled on the topic of changes in spoken English over the centuries, precious little has been put to paper on the topic of mutations in the orthography, and even less about the phasing in and out of particular characters. In particular, the letter thorn, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568,7349,7350],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-murc","category-murc-proposals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1610"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":205,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204\/revisions\/205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/evolsds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}