Re: thorn vs. y or th, eth and other similar letters/signs (was: Level of Unicode support required for various languages)

On Oct 27, 2007, at 4:57 AM, Philippe Verdy wrote:

> I did not realise that the old orthography "thou" (common in English  
> priest
> books and Bible) for the modern "you" could have a common origin  
> with the
> same original thorn letter, which was transliterated differently  
> between the
> two orthographies. I initially thought that the change of  
> orthography was
> justified only by change of phonetics, but now it seems that the  
> original
> orthography with thorn allowed two possible realizations.
>


Huh?  No, this is not the case.  English "thou" is cognate with other  
second person singular pronouns (tu, du), and "you" with the other  
second person plural pronouns (vous, vos).  Archaic English letters  
aren't involved at all.

=====
John H. Jenkins
[email protected]