17th Century Shopping List Discovered Under Floorboards of English Home | Hacker News Reader

17th Century Shopping List Discovered Under Floorboards of English Home

smithsonianmag.com

124 pointssamclemens22 comments

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.

Yes! 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. :)

Is 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!

Unless the you in question was plural. See https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thee.

Nowhere near that old, but I remember a fun moment when I was a kid and living in an old house (in the UK). While redecorating we found some old folding window-shutters that had been covered over, and they were packed in with scraps of newspaper. The scraps described Germans reaching Paris and stern telegrams from the British Government telling them to behave themselves. It was from the Franco-Prussian War, 1870.

Does that mean the floorboards or joists are also over 400 years old? Being from the West coast of the US I find that equally amazing for some reason.

"Some of these buildings are over 20 years old!" -Steve Martin, L.A. Story

Better images of the actual list described: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4145360/400-year-old...

There's a lot wrong with the Daily Mail but one thing they often do well is showing good quality pictures.

Pretty cool, but why is this being submitted here? (Not that it shouldn't be - just curious why.)

HN isn't just limited to technical and startup discussion. Sometimes you just want to share something cool :)

So you're saying that hacker news is no longer for hacker-related news?

The whole world wants to "share something cool". I come here so that I only get the cool tech stuff. My 2 cents.

You might want to read the guidelines, linked in the footer. The very first section deals with your assumption as to what's on-topic here.

If you want to save yourself a click...

Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity

I would say the content fits this description.

I figured that they might benefit from reading the rest of the guidelines, too.

Team work. You point to the full guidelines. I cover the people in a rush who want a ;TLDR. ;)

> no longer

other people have pointed out the guidelines. I wanted to point out that something similar has existed for many years. https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...

You might want to read dang's reply here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10605253

>I come here so that I only get the cool tech stuff.

Then, honestly, this is the wrong place. Yeah, a good portion of it is cool tech stuff, but it's not (and has never been) exclusively that.

This is cool tech stuff! It's just not explicitly related to computing. How much techier can you get than the language used to communicate all the other tech stuff?

Wow...I was simply asking "why" is this here?

Is it the change in the English language over time?

The types of things that were on the list, compared to what's considered normal today?

Is it the fact that it just shows the month + year, vs YYYY-MM-DD-HH-mm-SS.XXTZ like we must have now?

Is it the idea of what appeared to be a letter that might have been posted via mail to some other place in advance of the courier which would retrieve the goods requested?

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My point is that there are a number of reasons why this could have been posted here on HN, but no indication of any of those was given.

So I was wondering.

Sheesh.

No idea why you were downvoted. I think the reason you haven't got a good answer is because samclemens isn't answering and the rest of us don't know his (or her, or its) reasons.

Because when the question asked is, "Why is this story on HN?", there's no way to tell whether you're asking "Why is this non-technical, non-belonging story here?", which is highly disfavored, and "What precisely interested the submitter about this story?", which is, well, not terribly important.

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