5 ms·
One particularly cool aspect of the letter: you can see a late stage in the evolution away from the letter thorn (Þþ) in English. In the transcription in the a
by blahedo 9y ago
One particularly cool aspect of the letter: you can see a late stage in the evolution away from the letter thorn (Þþ) in English. In the transcription in the article it's transcribed as 'y', and at this point it was no longer in general use but as an abbreviation for the word "the" it hung on for a while as a highly stylised thorn (which does kind of look like a 'y') and a superscript 'e'. If you view the image in a separate window you can see it most clearly in the last line ("ye prises") and also two lines up from that ("ye others").
You might have heard about the general phenomenon (it's the reason people going for an old-timey look prefix stuff with "Ye Olde") but it's cool to see it "in the wild", so to speak.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoYes! If I'm recalling correctly, "þ" was always pronounced "th" and was eventually replaced with the digraph "th" in print, so the definite article "þe" should properly be pronounced and transcribed as "the". On the other hand, the pronoun "ye" ("Judge not, lest ye be judged") actually is spelled and pronounced with a "y". English is confusing. :)
- Wildgoose 9y agoIs this the whole story though? I am a Yorkshireman (northern county in England) and we still colloquially use "thee" and "thou", (the latter more normally pronounced "tha"). "Judge not, lest thee be judged" would fit with the initial "y" being a thorn character. English orthography has retained a lot of history!
- kwhitefoot 9y agoUnless the you in question was plural. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thee https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thee.