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Interesting article. There was an something on the BBC News website a while back with two sides of a similar argument, only one side was written in a style that
by gb 17y ago
Interesting article. There was an something on the BBC News website a while back with two sides of a similar argument, only one side was written in a style that was supposed to be easier to read; it certainly wasn't for me as it was written with a more southern (southern English that is) accent and I had to re-read certain words several times to work out what they were supposed to be.
I know this part was only covered briefly, but English did used to have two different letters for the "th" sounds - ð (like the) and þ (like thin), I suppose they were dropped for simplicity of the written alphabet in the end.
- Tangurena 17y agoThe letter thorn (þ), when hand-written, looks a lot like the letter Y [1]. So it remains, somewhat, in stuff like "Ye Olde Shoppe." Wikipedia claims that eth and thorn died out in common use (in English, anyway) between 1300 and 1500. Notes: 1 - It gets drawn in one motion, down to the center from the upper left, then looping up to the upper right, back down to the center and down from there. So it looks like a sloppy Y.
- gb 17y agoWow, that's really interesting, I never realised that's where "Ye" came from. I suppose a similar thing happened with yogh (ȝ) - instead of being replaced with something less ambiguous it became z in some cases, but is still pronounced the original way. I think it only survives in some Scottish names in that form though.