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Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

Eth is the character you’re thinking if, not thorn.

Eth has voice on and thorn voice off.

The eth/thorn distinction was fairly arbitrary in actual written Old English, with thorn being more common. The modern distinction between eth and thorn being based off of voice originated in Icelandic, I think? That's the only language that still uses them in its modern form, anyways.

Icelandic preserves old Norse so you’re accidentally implying Old Norse originated in its own derivative.

I admit I'm only going off of Wikipedia, but that claims (in the "Old Norse" article) that extant writings from that period used thorn exclusively, and again the use of thorn and eth as the unvoiced and voiced variants is a relatively modern convention.

This says it really was thorn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_olde#History

Ð/ð (eth) certainly is the voiced th in Old English and modern Icelandic. I’m not sure why thorn was being used for ‘the’.

I would recommend consulting Prokosh Comparative Germanic Grammar.

It’s a very old reference and may not be online, but what my germanic linguistics professor used with us Germanic linguistics grad students. He was a world renowned expert on the various futhark versions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmer_H._Antonsen

Prokosch's book is still available

https://a.co/d/0u4S28Y

AFAIK thorn and eth were used in free variation, as there is rarely any possibility of confusion.

I'm not huge on taking the Wikipedia entry at face value and prefer to look at the references used for the entry. In this case the reference CHAPTER 25 TYPOGRAPHY AND THE PRINTED ENGLISH TEXT, page 6, does mention that y/ye was used in place of both eth and thorn.

Mispelling or incomplete font set for printing press possibly?

Note modern English collapsed the distinction into simpler orthography, “th” for both eth and thorn, so simplicity in spelling certainly happens.

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