this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2025
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No Stupid Questions

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It might be specific to Lemmy, as I've only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can't possibly be easier than just writing "th"? And in many comments I see "th" and "þ" being used interchangeably.

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[–] MourningDove@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago

lol! That’s the “no LLM is going to steal my shit guy!” He’s still around? Man. If it’s who I think it is, they used to be completely normal.

[–] gusgalarnyk@lemmy.world 23 points 6 days ago (12 children)

I get that it's one person, I get that it's an earnest but unsuccessful attempt to counter-AI, but also isn't it kinda cool to advance the human language in a personal way. I'm surprised Lemmy is so upset by it, maybe that's just the boomer mentality or maybe it's the mentality of hating change, but like everyone can admit the English language is obtuse and hard to master and that's partially because we have less letters than we have phonetic sounds (look at phonetic, it's actually fOnetik). Couldn't we use some advancement in that area of our life? And wouldn't a grass roots movement on Lemmy symbolize the kind of simple, systemic changes we need more of this world? I mean isnt it kinda punk to improve the world in whatever way you can?

Idk, just reading the comments in this thread people seem more antagonistic than I would expect. It's not like we're/he's jumping to the shavian alphabet. It's just a single change that anyone can immediately solve after reading a sentence or two with it present.

Point is I like it. And I have no idea how to type it on my phone lol

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[–] CTDummy@aussie.zone 24 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Im almost certain it’s trolling with the AI reason as an excuse. It would have very little effect on an AI, which would recognise the character as anomalous and discard it or ignore the comment. The only other person I saw doing it replied with every character replaced with similar nonsense when I stated similar to them. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was their former account as it was a while ago and it was copping bans because of it.

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[–] mrslt@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days ago

I don't know, but I downvote every improper use of the thorn.

[–] Sunsofold@lemmings.world 12 points 5 days ago (4 children)

From what I understand it's a way to subtly screw with AI. Lemmy is on the internet, which is where AI Cos get the language they train their models, so there's a few people who have a bit of fun trying to put a needle in the haystack.

I always liked the thorn though, ever since I learned about it on QI. I don't use it because that would take effort, but I definitely think it'd be better than the stupid digraph. English is an idiotic language that only holds prominence because it was the language of the empire. Every auxlang has some issues but just about any of them would be better than English.

[–] trolololol@lemmy.world 10 points 5 days ago (4 children)

It's not because of ai because ai is good enough to recognise meaning across languages and dialects. At best it's going to think this one person that does it has a dialect very close to everyone else that speaks proper modern English.

But yeah that's the claim the single person doing it repeats. I personally think they're trolling everyone but ai.

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[–] Tetragrade@leminal.space 3 points 4 days ago

I þon't know.

[–] aggelalex@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

It's rather amusing to me, a language nerd. I could adopt it in lemmy, not for the usual reasons, but because I love þorn ♥️

[–] sefra1@lemmy.zip 4 points 4 days ago

I thought it was an encoding bug, lol

[–] edgemaster72@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago (6 children)

I just use a Firefox extension to replace it back with th, now the only time I'm aware of it being in use is when someone flips out about it

[–] AEsheron@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

Đere's no escaping us, broðer.

Once upon a time, English both used thorn, the character you are replacing, and eth, the one I just used here. One was used for words like that, this, there, and the other was used for thin, thank, and throw. That didn't last very long, linguistically speaking. They quickly became interchangeable, and thorn rapidly became the most popular one. But I think if people want to bring it back, we should bring them both back. And while we're at it, we should bringing back the "four form system." IE, we used to have two different ways to say yes or no, those two words were specifically used to answer a negative question. Current English leaves negative questions impossible to answer with a single word wothout ambiguity. "Will they not go?" cannot be answered with only yes or no in Modern English's 2 form system. But with a 4 form system, we had yea and nay for general usage. "Will they go?" Yea means they will, nay means they won't. But with the negative form of the question, "Will they not go?" Yes means they will, and no means they won't. Over time yea and nay were both dropped and yes and no became universal.

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[–] Zier@fedia.io 14 points 6 days ago (1 children)

You will be shocked to learn that "þ" is actually a letter used in modern Icelandic. It's not just an old letter. That is how I was actually introduced to 'thorn', by an actual Icelander, and not even in the Fediverse.

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[–] xpey@piefed.social 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

TIL about the AI poisoning thingy.

I used to be in r/bringbackthorn so I just thought it was a fun thing lol

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[–] ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Autistic people of Lemmy: THEY’RE DOING LANGUAGE WRONG!!!

Also autistic people of Lemmy: ÞEy’Re DoInG lAnGuAgE wRoNg chortle

Non-autistic people of Lemmy: Hahahahaha sorry that’s the joke

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Also also autistic people of lemmy:

Would you like a linguistic history lesson?

Perhaps I could interest you in Icelandic?

... maybe we can settle for the 'long s', written sort of like an f with no crossbar ( ſ ), or sometimes even approaching the modern integral symbol of calculus?

https://www.rd.com/article/long-s-us-constitution/

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago (1 children)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

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 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.[1]

[–] finitebanjo@lemmy.world 4 points 5 days ago (3 children)

That's great except for the fact that it doesn't answer the question and also in a way calls the person asking a liar.

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[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 4 days ago

Gotta be real for one mo.

People here are being very... what to call it, Reddity? Twittery? Shitty?

Someone does it for multiple reasons. It's their "signature". Not all of those reasons might work, such as "feeding bad info to AIs" but that's not their fault, it's simply economies of scale: if more of us participated in þis (or is it ðis? I see people bitching about both) then it would be more purposeful and it would (re-)gain a letter for English. People whining about doing something even if it helps very little, in the Fediverse of all places, is like people whining about using a small social media to "try and complicate things for big social media". Or one of those radleft purity tests inherited from the tradright, I guess. Dunno which one is worse.

Me? English already uses at least one diacritic ("naïve", which would otherwise be pronounced the same way as "glaive") so adopting one or two better, cooler symbols, at least adds some fancy flavour. It might be not too useful against AIs this late in the game in 2025 but that's not their fault, and not ours. Ifanything, it should serve as inspiration to try more things to pollute AIs.

And if that's not the reason? I'll buy that too. It gets me to practice AltGr, for one. It looks cool when printed. It makes for a nifty smiley ( and yes, smileys are better than emojis). Whatever your cup of tea, have some. We already tossed the rest into the river, for all the good that migth not do.

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