"Ye Olde English" That is pronounced: the old english. The Y is actually a "thorn" - a letter lost to modern english. The trailing e on olde is the least of

"Ye Olde English" That is pronounced: the old english. The Y is actually a "thorn" - a letter lost to modern english. The trailing e on olde is the least of its worries. "Correct" spelling used to be completely optional back in the day. The word english has had many variants and the capitalisation for all three words is simply for effect. I live in a little town now called Yeovil (Somerset, UK) that was documented as gifle (bend in a river) in about 300 or 400AD and since has had at least sixty documented spellings. It went via Ivel and Givelle and a lot of others. Substitute y for g and squint a lot. That y for g thing works quite a lot for English to German place names. For example Weybury (en) and Wegburg (de) - note that -burg and -bury are fortified towns. There are a few simple patterns that can be seen with the old and modern languages but it rapidly gets out of hand and it gets quite hard to see how say: scire gereva becomes shire reeve and hence a sheriff!