(This is what I think a blog is for. When I find an interesting fact that nobody else probably cares about, I can just make a blog entry, and not send a boring e-mail to all of my friends.)
Did you ever wonder what happened to the thorn (þ)? Did you ever wish that /th/ was one letter, and not two? Here's what happened, according to the usage note for "ye" at Dictionary.com:
Usage Note: In an attempt to seem quaint or old-fashioned, many store signs such as “Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe” use spellings that are no longer current. The word ye in such signs looks identical to the archaic second plural pronoun ye, but it is in fact not the same word. Ye in “Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe” is just an older spelling of the definite article the. The y in this ye was never pronounced (y) but was rather the result of improvisation by early printers. In Old English and early Middle English, the sound (th) was represented by the letter thorn (þ). When printing presses were first set up in England in the 1470s, the type and the typesetters all came from Continental Europe, where this letter was not in use. The letter y was used instead because in the handwriting of the day the thorn was very similar to y. Thus we see such spellings as ye for the, yt or yat for that, and so on well into the 19th century. However, the modern revival of the archaic spelling of the has not been accompanied by a revival of the knowledge of how it was pronounced, with the result that (y
) is the usual pronunciation today.I guess it doesn't say why /y/ became /th/, but that wasn't the question, was it? (Tune in tomorrow...)
Closing Music: Life's Gonna Suck by Denis Leary
1 comment:
If you really like this sort of thing, you may enjoy reading The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language by David Crystal (Cambridge University Press). I warn you that it really is a reference book, not a novel to be read from cover to cover. You can learn a lot about English from that and from Exploring English Grammar by Geoff Sammon (Cornelsen Verlag) and Grammar Guide by Gordon Jarvie (Bloomsbury Press).
I admit that since I instruct English courses, I've been reading a lot more of this kind of thing than the average person out there. I also have a friend who is studying linguistics at the moment and talked to me about affricatives. You know you're in trouble when your friends start talking about affricatives.
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