Your random fact of the day

[ivyfic]

You know how whenever someone's trying to be cute and antiquated, they'll use "ye", as in "ye olde shoppe"? The definite article in English has never been "ye". It's always always been "the".

This "ye" misconception is the result of a printers' convention. Back before print, when scribes first started writing in English, they adapted Germanic runes for the sounds in English not found in Latin. One of these was "th", which they represented with the thorn, a rune that looked kind of like a p with a flag on it. Over time, as many scribes wrote this out, it morphed into a y-looking thing. When the printing press came around, the first typographic fonts were designed to look identical to handwriting, so printers, too, adopted the thorn rune as an abbreviation for "th". This symbol even appears in Shakespeare's first folio.

But it was never a y. It was always pronounced "th". So the next time someone says "ye olde shoppe," you can correct them like a true pedant.

Comments

[ecmyers.livejournal.com]

I am so disillusioned. You've ruined everything!