In Old English, the fricatives took the voiced allophones , and when they were word-internal, and in Middle Dutch also when word-initial; see: Pronunciation of English ⟨th⟩. In Old High German, the stops were moved according to the High German consonant shift. In Dutch, the idiosyncrasies of this shift mean that Dutch (like German) experiences the shift þ→d but (like English) does not experience the shift d→t; thus the dental variety of "" is eliminated in Dutch by the normal operation of sound laws. Likewise, and merged in almost all Germanic languages (except Gothic and German), eliminating this variety early on. In Old Norse, and likewise merged altogether.