[Potironette]

What's this item? Iðunn the Ever Young

Also, viewing the items is really useful for looking at shop threads!
Is it possible to have the avatar viewer scroll down like in the avatar creator?

[Tohopekaliga]

Hmm, should be possible. I'll consider it for future additions.


...Hmm. The norse th symbol. Of course we have an item with that. XD Uh. Guess I'd better figure out how to make that one display.

[Potironette]

Lol XD. Ithunn. I was wondering how to pronounce that XD

[Coda]

Specifically, it's the voiced "th" from "that", not the voiceless "th" from "thing". The other sound is a different character that looks like a p with the stem raised (which I can't type at the moment).

[Potironette]

"Ee-thd-unn" ?

At first I'd thought it was a type of a-sound because the item viewer turned the letter into: " ð "

:x

[Tohopekaliga]

The A thing is just a quirk of character encoding.

[Coda]

If I'm not mistaken, the first syllable rhymes with "seethe" and the second syllable rhymes with "spoon," and the accent goes on the second syllable.

[Potironette]

"Ee-thd-oon" ?

What's character encoding..?

[Coda]

There's no d sound.

Character encoding is how computers store different letters. For normal American English text, different systems are fairly consistent in representation. If you go beyond that, there are a bunch of different ways to store things, and if you try to read something that was written with a different representation, you get that garbage (called "mojibake").

[Potironette]

So..the ð was just a way to store the ð?

I thought there was a "d" because "that" sounds slightly like "thd-at" the me XD

[Coda]

Close enough. Not QUITE true -- rather, the two things are different interpretations of the same stored data -- but close enough.

I guess I can't argue with that. It's easier to describe voiceless-vs-voiced with s and z. You produce s and z the same way, except with z you put some voice behind it while with s it's just the airflow making the sound. S is voiceless; z is voiced. The same is true for the two kinds of th.

[Potironette]

Ohh, I never thought about it that way! So "eethoon" where the "th" has a sound behind it?

Close enough. Not QUITE true -- rather, the two things are different interpretations of the same stored data -- but close enough.

...
...
interpretations..
what does storing even mean X'D
...close enough probably means I'm misunderstanding something X'D

[Coda]

Computers can only deal in 1's and 0's. In both Latin-1 and UTF-8 (two different ways of storing text), an uppercase letter A is stored as 01000001 (that is, 65). In UTF-8, ð is stored as 1100001110110000. However, if you read those 1's and 0's using Latin-1, 11000011 is à and 10110000 is °.

Where things REALLY start getting confused is if you have some part of the software that thinks the data is stored on-disk in Latin-1 and wants to translate it into UTF-8 to talk to your web browser. Then it takes what it thinks is "ð" and converts it into how UTF-8 would express those... 1100001110000011 for à and 1100001010110000 for °. Because that's what it would have to send to a web browser if you WANTED to see "ð".

[Potironette]

So..
the ð starts out as "1100001110110000" in UTF-8, then somehow something related to the link thinks that the same "1100001110110000" is à and ° in Latin-1, but wants to change what it reads as Latin-1 into UTF-8, so it converts the à and ° to 1100001110000011 for à and 1100001010110000 for °?

And so, ð is stored by 1s and 0s but there's this thing called Latin-1 and UTF-8 which use the 1s and 0s differently and that's why the à and ° happened?

[Coda]

You got it! :D

[Potironette]

Yay! Thanks for explaining :D!