Dreams come true. You just have to be willing to work for them.

~ Annie Mist Þórisdóttir

Apparently, these two-fer posts aren’t as rare as I thought.

Without thinking, as I transcribed that quote, I used their preferred way of writing their name—at least, that’s how they are attributed in the source I had at hand. (Every web site I find romanizes it to Thorisdottir, offensively—in my opinion—sterilizing the family name to simple roman letters.) I was feeling all proud about even being able to write that character.

And then I went to file the quote in the slipbox. Uh… “Houston, we have a problem here.”

Step one: What is it? It’s a Thorn. Wikipedia helpfully, (that’s sarcasm,) explains:

[…] in modern Icelandic, it is pronounced as a laminalvoiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative [θ̠],^[1][2] similar to th as in the English word thick, or a (usually apical) voiced alveolar non-sibilant fricative [ð̠],^[1][2] similar to th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter ðæt ⟨Ð, ð⟩; however, [ð̠] may occur as an allophone of /θ̠/, and written ⟨þ⟩, when it appears in an unstressed pronoun or adverb after a voiced sound.^[3]

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

I didn’t quote the part where they say, it’s not actually related to the letter P, which we get from Greek.

Well it looks like a P. That suggests filing this person under “PO”.

Iceland is the only place that has not, long ago, replaced it with “th”, and it’s pronounced like “th”ick. So I’m going to treat it like “TH,” and then Þórisdóttir gets filed under “TO”. (Wait, why not under, “TH”. Because my index of people is arranged by first-letter, plus next-vowel—not by the first two letters.)

ɕ