A recent online crossword puzzle offered "Thou" as the clue, asking for a four-letter answer beginning with "ON_ _". I was totally stumped until I filled in the crossing words to find the answer to be "ONEG." Cruciverbalists will recognize ONEG as ONE "G", equivalent to a thousand dollars, so the clue was "thou" as in "I lost three thou gambling in Vegas," not the archaic pronoun.
As I thought about it later I realized that I would have had no trouble had the clue been pronounced out loud because "thou" pronoun has a tiny difference in pronunciation from "thou" thousand. Try it for yourself. The pronoun starts with one's tongue against the teeth, but it quickly drops away. The "thousand" version starts the same, but adds a breath of exhaled air over the tongue to accentuate the first two letters.
On to Wiktionary, where the pronunciation of pronoun "thou" is described as /ðaʊ/, while the pronunciation of the "thousand" thou is /θaʊ/.
I have no idea what those symbols mean (except the theta) or how to use them, but I'm pleased to discover that someone else has taken the time to sort this out. Presumably it has something to do with variations in fricatives [a delightful word that you never get to use in everyday conversation]. This sort of trivia is going to be of interest only to obsessive-compulsive English majors; perhaps among the readers there is another one out there that can explain this better than I have.
The symbols ð and θ represent the 'same' sound in the International phonetic alphabet with one significant difference. For [ð] your vocal cords are vibrating and for [θ] there is no vibration. Compare how you pronounce the 'th' in 'than' vs. 'thank' or 'breathe' vs. 'breath'
ReplyDeleteThe symbols come from the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA. Wikipedia also has a clear explanation here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#:~:text=The%20International%20Phonetic%20Alphabet%20(IPA,speech%20sounds%20in%20written%20form.
ReplyDeleteIn your particular "thou" examples, both are fricatives, as you correctly deduced, and dental (made with the tongue against the upper teeth). However, the first symbol (eth) is voiced -- using the vocal cords --whereas the second symbol (theta) is unvoiced.
Use of eth vs theta can be not only contextual but accent-specific. For example, I say Thanksgiving with an eth, but my wife uses a theta
Thank you, Will (and anon). That is exactly the type of explanation I was hoping to receive. I am endlessly impressed by the depth and range of erudition of the readers here. :-)
DeleteYou're not wrong in what you perceive, but there is a deeper cause: When pronouncing thou = you, the vocal cords are vibrating during the "th" (the "th" is voiced). When pronouncing thou = 1,000, the vocal cords are open (the "th" is unvoiced), resulting among other things in a more forceful air flow.
ReplyDeleteI enjoy cryptic crosswords, even tho I am out of prac.
ReplyDeleteBut omitting proper punctuation and using abbreviated words, without a period even, is surely cheating.
Cheating not even in the clue but also with the answer, oneg is not a word.
My advice is wait for winter and use the paper that crossword was printed on as a firestarter.
Clue - Reversed abbreviated full set of 23, used on example.
Answer - One thousand.
Sigh.
WilliamRocket, I also enjoy cryptics (especially the Harper's ones), but the incident I'm describing came up in a standard crossword from the Los Angeles Times -
Deletehttps://www.latimes.com/games/daily-crossword
Oneg is a word though, albeit borrowed from Hebrew: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oneg#English
DeleteI do the LA Times crosswords online daily too, and managed to not understand that answer; "one G," common as it is, just didn't come to mind. But now I understand!
DeleteSandra
"The symbols come from the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA."
ReplyDeleteI get the impression whoever dreamed all these tags, titles, treatise, drank a lot of IPA.
xoxoxoBruce
As a retired Medical Lab rat I would have read ONEG as O-Neg and been confused for the rest of my life.
ReplyDeleteEnglish used to have different letters for 'th' sounds:
ReplyDeleteþ - called 'thorn'
ð - called 'eth'
Now wikipedia tells me that these were used interchangeably for whatever 'th' sound the writer felt like in Old English, but what I was taught was that they were used specifically for the two different 'th' sounds in Old English. As the language developed towards Middle English ð dropped out of popularity until þ was used for both, and then 'th' started to push out þ. (And then typesetters using newfangled imported printing presses didn't have a letter þ so substituted y, and so 'Ye' for 'the' happened)
Thank you, Marge. That's very interesting.
DeleteIcelandic is the only modern language where the letter thorn is still in common use.
Delete