Hacker News Reader

Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's interesting that despite our access to this sort of information, a huge number of people still don't understand that "Ye Olde" was not pronounced "Yee" and rather "The".

View on HN

I know it's pronounced 'the', but 'yee' is more fun

“Yee oldy hat shoppy” is the most fun.

You forgot to throw “timey” in there too ;)

Milliner doesn't have the same ring.

What if it was a hatter and not a milliner?

Just mercurial madness

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q6EoRBvdVPQ

It is because the Y was a character called 'thorn' and it symbol was Y drawn as a stick, pronounced the like the 'th' in the and thorn. Also s got reversed and became the z we know today. This article was written by someone who knows noYing.

Actually, the article ends with "The ampersand isn’t the only former member of the alphabet. Learn what led to the extinction of the thorn and the wynn." (which links to https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-alphabet/)

Not thorn. Thorn is the vertical bar with circle: unvoiced th.

It’s eth (voice on, like in pronouncing “that”).

Icelandic still uses both, didn’t replace both with ambiguous “th”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth

If you're speaking, and don't pronounce it "yee", nobody will know that you're making a reference to the "Ye Olde" orthography.

I only learned that in university. I did a joint major in English and history, but it actually came up in a history module in an offhand comment by the lecturer. I’m not surprised it’s little known.

Old English is just generally not a priority. There are only so many hours in the schoolday and so many schooldays in the year.

Need to teach kids to be self learners. I knew these facts about old English, but I wasn’t taught them in school. I learned them on my own.

Other kids know facts that you don't because people care about different things.

> Old English is just generally not a priority

“Ye Olde” is Middle English (or maybe even Early Modern)

Old English doesn’t look like English at all. To my eyes, it looks Scandinavian-even though I know it is closer to Dutch than to Swedish/Danish/Norwegian. Actually, the closest living relative to Old English (apart from its descendants) is Frisian, a minority language of the Netherlands and northern Germany.

My immature side just thinks it's fun to write þorn.

To mean this song, I presume: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSZBIs0gs0E

That’s eth (voiced th), which was the greek letter delta with hash across the top, visible in Icelandic still, and some typographer used a Y at some point and overlooked the loop at the bottom.

Typos evidently perputuate!

Well, world is huge and amount of stuff you might not know is endless.

https://xkcd.com/1769/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com