θ as An Alphabet Replaces "Th"

tuckerkao

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I really wish there can be some alphabet learning cards specially made to pronounce the "th" sound. Actually there are much more common words start with "th" than x.

How often do we say "Th" is for thumb?

Th -
θeater, θermometer, θief, θread, θree, θroat, θumb, θunder

X -
Xbox, X-Ray, Xylophone
Xenon as the 54th element on the periodic table may not be recognizable by many people.
Xylem is a special botany word for the transport tissue inside the plant.
Xenomass - A strategic resource in Civ V Beyond Earth
 
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θong,
 
Theta looks awful in the context of the rest of the English alphabet.

I do wish we'd bring back æsc, eð, and þorn though. Yogh can come back too
 
Language only moves forward and away from the past.
 
How so?
 
As Old English became Middle English, the diverse pluralization system normalized into -s. So you have Old English forms like cyning ~ cyningas -> king/kyng ~ kinges/kynges; feld ~ felda -> feld ~ felds; frogga ~ froggan -> frogge ~ frogges; tung ~ tungan -> tung ~ tungs.

So most notable for us here is that there was a whole class of nouns in Old English that pluralized with -an: tung, frogge, guma, nama. However, the only noun that retained this n-plural form was oxa ~ oxan, now reflected in ox ~ oxen. Child, which is to say, the OE equivalent cild pluralized to cildra. So, if child were following the trend of literally every other word in the development of Middle English, we would expect to see a form of child ~ childres, or else a form like child ~ childer, similar to the German pluralized form kind ~ kinder (and indeed childer is an archaic form which occasionally pops up in Middle English). However childres is not the form we see, because child was misanalyzed as belonging to the -an class of nouns, so we get a result of the form actually "regressing" to a more archaic plural form, rather than standardizing like pretty much every other word in the English language did.
 
As Old English became Middle English, the diverse pluralization system normalized into -s. So you have Old English forms like cyning ~ cyningas -> king/kyng ~ kinges/kynges; feld ~ felda -> feld ~ felds; frogga ~ froggan -> frogge ~ frogges; tung ~ tungan -> tung ~ tungs.

So most notable for us here is that there was a whole class of nouns in Old English that pluralized with -an: tung, frogge, guma, nama. However, the only noun that retained this n-plural form was oxa ~ oxan, now reflected in ox ~ oxen. Child, which is to say, the OE equivalent cild pluralized to cildra. So, if child were following the trend of literally every other word in the development of Middle English, we would expect to see a form of child ~ childres, or else a form like child ~ childer, similar to the German pluralized form kind ~ kinder (and indeed childer is an archaic form which occasionally pops up in Middle English). However childres is not the form we see, because child was misanalyzed as belonging to the -an class of nouns, so we get a result of the form actually "regressing" to a more archaic plural form, rather than standardizing like pretty much every other word in the English language did.
You are lost in the weeds. Language moves forward in fits and starts, sideways and with leaps and bounds. Just look at how texting is changing how we spell things. The tiny details don't mean much. It is the big shifts that count. IIRC it was the 80s when nouns became verbs and words like deplane showed up.

I didn't realise it was legal for an American to know so much about the English language.
It's not. He is breaking the law.
 
Owen's posts on this topic remind me of the old TV series The Story of English, which was hosted by Robert MacNeil (one half of the old PBS MacNeil-Lehrer Report). The series was informative and interesting, and there was a segment about the Old English word for "kings" and examples of how the grammar worked back then.
 
You are lost in the weeds. Language moves forward in fits and starts, sideways and with leaps and bounds. Just look at how texting is changing how we spell things. The tiny details don't mean much. It is the big shifts that count. IIRC it was the 80s when nouns became verbs and words like deplane showed up.

I'm on my phone and only taking a short break from reading, so i can't elaborate, but honestly I just wanted to throw out a wrench in your argument that gave me an excuse to blather about OE pluralization. Your argument is much more seriously wrong on disciplinary-methodological and teleological grounds.

As to text spelling - the txt speech is actually a very literal return to abbreviations employed in telegram writing. I.e. A lot of the spelling and phrase abbreviations we use in texting are exactly the same as were used by English speakers writing telegrams in which senders were charged by the letter. So it could be said that the development of "txt talk" could be seen as a regression of the language back to an older form of writing. Which overlooks the fact that writing != speech.
 
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But then th is two different sounds so you need two characters
 
But then th is two different sounds so you need two characters

Which is why ð and þ is better ;)

Ðe Þeolodʒical Position of Martin Luþer

Or something like that. Maybe we should bring in schwa, esh and ezh too. I mean while we're at it, we should develop a consistent manner of representing our vowel sounds.

Splitting the i of hip and the i of heel
Splitting the u of dumb and tube
Splitting the a of apple and awful (hence æsc)
Splitting the a/u/o of: lot, taught, foot, goose, and strut

Actually representing our diphthongs as diphthongs (able would be spelled eibel or eibl, for example)

Of course then you run into the inevitable problem of trying to fix English spelling: the argument for doing so is that English spelling doesn't accurately reflect English pronunciation, but English pronunciation is so varied that achieving a system that captures pronunciation accurately is essentially impossible. I mean, a really simple problem that immediately pops out in the above proposals: the vowels of lot and taught represent different sounds in some parts of America (particularly in the Midwest), and in many parts of England, but those two words rhyme for my Californian accent. pen-pin is another commonly cited example; the words represent two different vowels in my accent, but are the same vowel for many Californians.

"Knight" originally had distinct sounds for each letter, ie seven. It is now three. That is going forward.

J

This is not entirely true. The original OE word was cniht, represented in IPA as /kniçt/ (pronounced roughly as kuh-neecht (with the ch here being equivalent to the German /ch/ as in Bach). The sound would have been very similar to the modern German Knecht (/knɛçt/) with the only difference being the vowel. This is all to say that "knight" originally had either 4 or 5 distinct phonemes, depending on whether or not you define /kn/ as an affricate, which I do. As for the modern variant, it represents 3 sounds, yes, but the short /i/ of cniht was lengthened into the diphtong /ai/, so the time taken to say the word is technically the same as it would have been in Old English.

And if your argument is that fewer sounds = progress, then examples of us "going backwards" could be just as easily produced. OE pronunciation of cow was cu, which was two sounds: /k/ and a geminated /u/. Now that word is represented by a /k/ and the diphthon /aʊ̯/, which is more work for your mouth and tongue. Likewise mouse is a diphthong in ModE where the OE was a simple geminated vowel: mus.
 
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