Eth (/ɛð/ edh, uppercase: ⟨Ð⟩, lowercase: ⟨ð⟩; also spelled edh or eð), known as ðæt (that) in Old English, is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian alphabets.
It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with ⟨dh⟩, and later ⟨d⟩.
Icelandic orthography uses a Latin-script alphabet which has 32 letters. Compared with the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the Icelandic alphabet lacks C, Q, W, and Z, but additionally has Ð, Þ, Æ, and Ö. Six letters have forms with acute accents to produce Á, É, Í, Ó, Ú and Ý.
The letters eth (⟨ð⟩, capital ⟨Ð⟩), transliterated as ⟨d⟩, and thorn (⟨þ⟩, capital ⟨Þ⟩), transliterated as ⟨th⟩, are widely used in the Icelandic language. Eth is also used in Faroese and Elfdalian, while thorn was used in many historical languages such as Old English. The letters ⟨æ⟩ (capital ⟨Æ⟩) and ⟨ö⟩ (capital ⟨Ö⟩) are considered completely separate letters in Icelandic and are collated as such, even though they originated as a ligature and a diacritical version respectively.
The Swedish Dialect Alphabet (Swedish: Landsmålsalfabetet) is a phonetic alphabet created in 1878 by Johan August Lundell and used for the narrow transcription of Swedish dialects. The initial version of the alphabet consisted of 89 letters, 42 of which came from the phonetic alphabet proposed by Carl Jakob Sundevall. It has since grown to over 200 letters. The alphabet supplemented Latin letters with symbols adapted from a range of alphabets, including modified forms of þ and ð from Germanic alphabets, γ and φ from the Greek alphabet and ы from the Cyrillic alphabet, and extended with systematic decorations. There are also a number of diacritics representing prosodic features.
The alphabet has been used extensively for the description of Swedish dialects in both Sweden and Finland. It was also the source of many of the symbols used by the Swedish sinologist Bernhard Karlgren in his reconstruction of Middle Chinese.
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 (Thurisaz) 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.
It represented a voiceless dental fricative [θ] or its voiced counterpart [ð]. However, in modern Icelandic it represents a laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative [θ̠], similar to th as in the English word thick, or a (usually apical) voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative [ð̠], similar to th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth ⟨Ð, ð⟩; however, [ð̠] may occur as an allophone of /θ̠/, and written ⟨þ⟩, when it appears in an unstressed pronoun or adverb after a voiced sound.
The Kingdom of Mercia was a state in the English Midlands from the 6th century to the 10th century. For some two hundred years from the mid-7th century onwards it was the dominant member of the Heptarchy and consequently the most powerful of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. During this period its rulers became the first English monarchs to assume such wide-ranging titles as King of Britain and King of the English.
Spellings varied widely in this period, even within a single document, and a number of variants exist for the names given below. For example, the sound th was usually represented with the Old English letters ð or þ.