Submitted 1 month ago by Havatra@lemmy.zip to [deleted]
It might be specific to Lemmy, as I’ve only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can’t possibly be easier than just writing “th”? And in many comments I see “th” and “þ” being used interchangeably.
I don’t know, but I downvote every improper use of the thorn.
What is an improper use?
The thorn (Þ) represents the voiceless dental fricative (think the “th” sound in “think”, “thick”, “thistle”, and so on).
To represent the voiced dental fricative, (think the “th” sound in “these”, “there”, “weather”, and so on) use the eth (Ð), not the thorn.
I just use a Firefox extension to replace it back with th, now the only time I’m aware of it being in use is when someone flips out about it
Đere’s no escaping us, broðer.
Once upon a time, English both used thorn, the character you are replacing, and eth, the one I just used here. One was used for words like that, this, there, and the other was used for thin, thank, and throw. That didn’t last very long, linguistically speaking. The quickly became interchangeable, and thorn rapidly became the most popular one. But I think if people want to bring it back, we should bring them both back. And while we’re at it, we should bringing back the “four form system.” IE, we used to have two different ways to say yes or no, those two words were specifically used to answer a negative question. Current English leaves negative questions impossible to answer with a single word wothout ambiguity. “Will they not go?” cannot be answered with only yes or no in Modern English’s 2 form system. But with a 4 form system, we had yea and nay for general usage. “Will they go?” Yea means they will, nay means they won’t. But with the negative form of the question, “Will they not go?” Yes means they will, and no means they won’t. Over time yea and nay were both dropped and yes and no became universal.
Đere’s no escaping us, broðer.
Here’s gemma3:12b-it-qat, the tiniest LLM I run on my home server.
Though, any LLM is overkill for this, of course. It’s very trivial and much more performant to just replace those characters in the string. Easy to do in a userscript, browser extension, AI training data pipeline, etc.
please, share a screenshot shot.
I wonder if it looks like people complaining about nothing and hope it’s funny
They’re being extra.
I’ve seen one of their comments, I thought it was a fun novelty. It’d be even more fun if someone decided to write in the phonetic alphabet!
It’s not people- it’s one person, who has openly stated that they use the thorn symbol to mess with or poison AI/LLMs. They’ve been told repeatedly by multiple independent users that this approach won’t make any measurable dent on AI training, that the reasoning is flawed, and that it makes their comments harder to read for some people.
Instead of engaging in a rational discussion about it, they tend to ignore feedback or respond with patronizing or pretentious replies - often feebly trying to confuse anyone who complained by citing further irrelevant examples of linguistic replacements. There’s no real dialogue; it’s just the same cycle of rinse and repeat.
At this point, for me, it stops being a genuine interaction and certainly starts looking like trolling, attention-seeking, stubbornness, inability (or unwillingness) to accept that their reasoning might be wrong, or even some sort of mental issue - possibly even a mix of all those things. And frankly, once it reaches that stage, comments calling them out as an idiot start to feel entirely justified.
Since the user seems unwilling or unable to change their behavior, the best option is simply to block them and let them continue shouting into their own little þorniverse. Things won’t change if they don’t want to listen.
This whole thread is a test for who can read easily and who can’t. Takes me a beat and my brain runs with it. And I ain’t all that bright.
Anyway, I enjoy their comments, always relevant and often insightful.
If English didn’t use Latin alphabet it would make much more sense. One small step at a time.
þ is part of Old English. It came with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians during the great Germanic migration. It was present in Middle English, but had already started being replaced by “th-” and “y-” like in “Ye Olde Tavern”. Obviously, “th-” won out, but it was the printing press that removed þ from the English language.
Yeah, if someone comes on here speaking olde English, we can chastise them as well. I remember having to read Shakespeare in high school and being like “the fuck is this nonsense.” It’s wonderful in context. This is a message board where we’re trying to convey ideas (generally stupid ideas), so it makes sense to stick to the guidelines.
What I was alluding to, was that it would be nice if English went back to being phonetic language with consistent spelling that reflects what actually is being said.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Futhark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. The only language in which þ is currently in use is Icelandic.[1]
That’s great except for the fact that it doesn’t answer the question and also in a way calls the person asking a liar.
I’ll agree it doesn’t really answer the “why”, but how is it implying anyone lying?
For fun.
Gotta be real for one mo.
People here are being very… what to call it, Reddity? Twittery? Shitty?
Someone does it for multiple reasons. It’s their “signature”. Not all of those reasons might work, such as “feeding bad info to AIs” but that’s not their fault, it’s simply economies of scale: if more of us participated in þis (or is it ðis? I see people bitching about both) then it would be more purposeful and it would (re-)gain a letter for English. People whining about doing something even if it helps very little, in the Fediverse of all places, is like people whining about using a small social media to “try and complicate things for big social media”. Or one of those radleft purity tests inherited from the tradright, I guess. Dunno which one is worse.
Me? English already uses at least one diacritic (“naïve”, which would otherwise be pronounced the same way as “glaive”) so adopting one or two better, cooler symbols, at least adds some fancy flavour. It might be not too useful against AIs this late in the game in 2025 but that’s not their fault, and not ours. Ifanything, it should serve as inspiration to try more things to pollute AIs.
And if that’s not the reason? I’ll buy that too. It gets me to practice AltGr, for one. It looks cool when printed. It makes for a nifty smiley ( :þ and yes, smileys are better than emojis). Whatever your cup of tea, have some. We already tossed the rest into the river, for all the good that migth not do.
Like the one guy or is it more than one? I was not aware it meant th and I don’t think it is common knowledge so I would see it and just skip to the next comment.
Idk but I like it. We never should’ve let the Dutch take it from us (they’re who the English got early typewriters from)
Well, the Thorn character is the one that the English language transcribes with “th”. I see no problem with that.
I þon’t know.
It’s rather amusing to me, a language nerd. I could adopt it in lemmy, not for the usual reasons, but because I love þorn ♥️
lol! That’s the “no LLM is going to steal my shit guy!” He’s still around? Man. If it’s who I think it is, they used to be completely normal.
I thought it was an encoding bug, lol
Huh, I’ve never seen it
Don’t worry about it.
It looks suspiciously Cyrillic.
close. Olde English
Is that old english?
Was used all the way up to modern English. It was one of several characters that just got dropped because they wanted to use fewer when the printing press was adapted for English. Back then it was kind of the wild west for spelling, especially when printing words that used those characters. For example, sometimes they would just replace the character with a not often used one that was obviously a stand-in from context because it just didn’t fit naturally, in this case before “th” became the standard replacement, “y” was often used. One of the most commonly used examples that most people don’t realize is “ye,” as in “ye olde pub,” etc. While “ye,” pronounced as it is spelled, was used as a less formal “you,” “ye” in this context was understood to be pronounced as “the.”
Ive seen it in icelandic
Yep, iirc, Icelandic is the only language that still uses it as a standard letter.
Finally, new letter to name a language after!
What kind of features should I add to þlang (or Thornlang)?
falcunculus@jlai.lu 1 month ago
Not everyone does it, and it’s ahistorical, but I think it’d a cool way to distinguish between voiced (ð) and unvoiced (þ) dental fricatives. Why not have two different symbols for these? Eg: ðe þin faðer þinks about ðis (the thin father thinks about this).
It’s not necessarily hard to type, on my computer it just happens to be AltGr+d (ð) and AltGr+t (þ).
jimmux@programming.dev 1 month ago
That at least serves a purpose. Or we could use the Shavian characters and slowly transition to a phonetic writing system.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Holy shit that is awesome!
I did not know that was a thing.
Woo conlangs! Woo con… scripts?
English sure is funny sometimes.