this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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It is called "thorn" and is an old English rune for the th sound.
Oh, a "rune", is it? Those old English were too stupid for "letters"? Sounds like someone's epoch-ism is on full display.
This glyph is so old, it comes from the times the Angles and Saxons actually used runes. The thorn was more edgy back then, too. Just think about why it is called thorn.
Its nice round belly is just a modern interpretation.
Fun Fact: Runes started as literally just the Roman alphabet adapted for carving into wood and stone.
The preceding Runic thorn was ᚦ. While similar to the Latin character Þ/þ, it makes sense to classify one as a rune (since it fits with other runes, which all have constant height) and the other as a letter (since they exist as uppercase and lowercase).
Similarly, the characters 칭 or 🐝 are not letters but a Hangul syllable and emoji, respectively.
Interesting! I always thought a letter was a thing that mapped to a sound. So obviously not Chinese characters. But the thorn as the th sound would qualify.
Nope. Phonemes or their groups, most commonly represented by IPA characters, map to a sound. If you know anything about English spelling, you'll know that letters and sounds don't correspond in many cases.
However, you are right that "letter" can be used for any segmental (phoneme-based) writing system, including runic (examples)