A Thorny Thing
I have a dream. A foolish dream that will never come true, but that's all right. Some dreams are like that.
Once upon a time, the English alphabet had more letters than it does now. And my dream is to bring some of them back.
In particular, I want to resurrect the old letter thorn[1] for the english dental fricative, "th", sound. Is that not a common enough sound to warrant its own letter? It only fell out of favor because early German-made printing presses didn't have that letter[2]. But haven't we moved beyond those limitations by now?
Now in an ideal world, we would all get an extra key on our keyboards dedicated to þe letter. But I fear þat while adding a new letter to þe alphabet may be straightforward, changing someþing so deeply entrenched as keyboards, may not be. And it would seem þat we are in þe same situation as þose early printers, unable to use þe letter however much we want to. But þis is not a disaster. Many word processors already have þe ability to alter þe characters we write on þe fly. It is common, for instance, to see þree hyphens in a row get converted to an em dash automatically. It would be easy to do þe same for þe letters "th" and þus all of our writing could be beautifully beþorned.
Þere would be several benefits to bringing it back. First of all, it would reduce confusion in a small number of words in which þe sequence "th" does not represent þe dental fricative. Such as "Neanderthal". It would also make english text look slightly cooler in my personal opinion. Eiþer of þese reasons would be sufficient, but combined þey make a powerful case.
[1]: The other letters are "eth" and "wynn". Eth represented the same sound as thorn, so bringing it back too would be redundant. And wynn was replaced by the letter "w" so has no gap to fill.
[2]: Þis is not actually true. Wikipedia tells me þat "þ" was already falling out of favor before þe arrival of þe printing press. But why let "facts" and "history" get in þe way of a good argument?
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