One of my favorite weird old English things is "ye." It's interesting that the "y" in "ye" was originally not y but the Anglo-Saxon character "thorn" (þ). Thorn

One of my favorite weird old English things is "ye." It's interesting that the "y" in "ye" was originally not y but the Anglo-Saxon character "thorn" (þ). Thorn slowly devolved into "y" due to most offset printing typefaces coming from parts of Europe which didn't have the Thorn character in their language. I guess English typesetters decided that a stylized y looks closer to a stylized þ than anything else that they could come up with, and just went with it. The funny thing though, is thorn is the deprecated character for a "th" sound. So, "ye olde pub" is actually "þe olde pub," which is intended to be pronounced "the old pub" when you use Thorn properly. We'd be confusing the hell out of someone from the middle ages by trying to say "ye old" at them and expecting them to understand it, because they'd be expecting us to just say "the." (Not to be confused with "ye" meaning "you," which is I think more or less an accurate. It's "ye" as "the" which is weird, and reminiscent of discovering the old man in Logan's Run or something.)