I was looking at Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in the bookstore the other day, and got to wondering if one of the many scholars on the SDMB could point me to a good and complete source for the proper pronounciation of the Anglo-Saxon letters used in Beowulf which no longer occur in modern English. I know there is the “thorn”, which I take to be a “th” …like the Greek Theta?
Thanks a lot! Thou art a scholar and a gentleman, sir.
I suppose that the question now becomes why we do not continue to have these letters.
The Romans didn’t use them. Therefor the Roman Church didn’t use them. Those areas that became subject to Roman Christianity ended up discarding anything that wasn’t in the Latin alphabet. Russia, you will notice, ended up making-up a new alphabet based primarily on the old Greek letters because the Church their was based on the Greek Christian church.