þah

þah is a reference to the letter thorn, written today as Þ (uppercase) and þ (lowercase). Thorn is a historical character used in Old English, Old Norse, and modern Icelandic to represent the dental fricatives found in the English words think and this. In phonology, the symbol commonly stood for a voiceless dental fricative [θ] and, in some contexts or languages, for a voiced dental fricative [ð], with its exact value varying by time and dialect.

Origins and usage develop a brief history: thorn originated in the early runic and Latin-script traditions to write the same “th” sound. In Old English and Old Norse manuscripts it appeared as a distinct letter. As the Latin alphabet expanded, thorn continued to be used in several medieval manuscripts, but many languages gradually replaced it with the digraph “th.” In modern times, thorn survives primarily in Icelandic, where Þ/þ remains the standard letter and pronunciation is still the dental fricative, similar to the English pronunciation of “think.” In English, thorn disappeared from standard orthography but appears in historical texts and in specialized typography and encoding.

Typography and encoding notes: thorn has Unicode code points U+00DE for the capital (Þ) and U+00FE for the lowercase (þ). In HTML, named entities exist as Þ and þ. The character remains a point of interest in discussions of orthography, phonology, and the history of the Latin alphabet.

See also: thorn, eth, Icelandic alphabet, Old English, runic alphabets.