Re: Oddity of English

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "squilluncus" <grvs@...> wrote:

>
> Within the Germanic language family the voicing of thorn in initial
> position, which seems to be restricted to pronominal words, is odd.
> I think of the, there, that, them, thou, thee, though, thus ...
>
> This occurred to me. Then shortly afterwards it occurred to me that

in

> Scandinavian this same type of words have developed from thorn to d,
> but others from thorn to t: there - der/där, them - dem, but: thing -

> ting, thaw - tö, thin - tunn.
>
> Is there an explanation for this?

They appear after verbs (the nominative ones do in frequent subject-
verb inversion), and therefore became almost enclitics which made
their thorn appear in something similar to word-internal position.


Torsten