5 ms·

Ye is really Þe (Þ = thorn) and it seems that printers, back in the day, used y instead, probably to save money. So it was probably considered old school when p

• jltsiren 13d ago
  His father was a farmer. Commoners usually didn't have family names at the time (except in Eastern Finland), but he needed one when he went to school.
  • sellmesoap 13d ago
    Hah conformance to standards, a tale as old as time.
• Sharlin 13d ago
  Yes, I know what ye is :) Similarly, the "olde Finnish" is usually not exactly historically accurate. Agricola was born Mikael Olofsson/Olavinpoika, i.e. a simple patronymic surname. He assumed the Latin name when he started studies in a Latin school [1] in Viborg/Viipuri (now Vyborg, Russia). He became interested in the Reformation and Renaissance humanism; later, as an ordained priest, he was sent to Wittenberg and studied directly under Luther himself. He was instrumental in executing the Reformation on the Finnish side of Sweden (then just a Swedish province; Finland as a political or geographical entity didn't really exist yet). Among other deeds, he translated the New Testament to Finnish from Luther's German translation (and besides the whole orthography, had to invent lots of new words in the process). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_school
• pge 13d ago
  The early printing presses in Britain were imported from the continent where the letter thorn was not used, so they didn’t have a thorn letter. The printers used either y or “th” (which was also already being used by scribes in place of thorn in parts of the country anyway) to replace thorn depending on how much space they had. Y followed by a superscript e was common way to print “the” when space was very limited.
• Tangurena2 13d ago
  When handwritten, thorn looks like a sloppy y.