It shortens two sounds the way they do it - the voiceless interdental fricative [θ] (think, bath) and the voiced interdental fritative [ð] (them, bathe).
If I were to do it, I’d use thorn for θ and eth (ð) for ð, but I can’t find a way to do so easily enough on Android for it to be worth it.
Stop helicoptering, put my clothes back on, and just sit in the chair?
English does have an above-average percentage of loanwords, but not the highest. Armenian and Romani are over 90% borrowings, for example.
Also, note that “smorgasbord” has undergone significant phonological adaptation in its borrowing to fit English’s phonotactics - it’s definitely not borrowed as-is.
This is called the “Right Hand Head Rule”; that is, the rightmost member of a compound in languages like English and German (almost) always acts as the “head”, the member that determines the grammatical information of the entire compound.
There are also many languages, such as Hebrew, with a Left Hand Head Rule, in which the leftmost member is the head. (Also Thai, as seen in a comment above!)
All languages borrow, including German. English is not at all weird in this way.
Nah, not misandrist enough.
Thanks! I’ll try it out!
Edit: I got it working! Þanks for ðe help! :D