The status of is somewhat different from and , since it appears in native Finnish words, too, as a regular "weak" correspondence of the voiceless (as a result of consonant gradation), and even in the infinitives of many verbs, such as "syödä", "to eat". At the time when Mikael Agricola, the "father" of literary Finnish, devised a system for writing the language, this sound still had the value of the voiced dental fricative , as in English "then". Since neither Swedish nor German of that time had a separate sign for this sound, Agricola chose to mark it with "d" or "dh".