English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

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English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

Postby DaveAgain » Wed Jun 09, 2021 10:13 am

Just learnt that early printers used Y for TH.
‘Þ’ (‘thorn’) is pronounced ‘th’ and existed in English until the early Middle Ages, until it got confused with the letter ‘y’, leading people to believe that ‘ye’ is an Ye Olde version of ‘the’. It isn’t. It was just that the printing presses used in England were imported from the continent and didn’t have a ‘Þ’, so they used ‘y’ instead.


https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/do-you-speak-viking

Ye (you) the pronoun was never THE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_(pronoun)#Confusion_with_definite_article
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Re: English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

Postby Le Baron » Sun Jun 20, 2021 8:02 pm

There was a bit about this on an episode of QI.

I heard about this quite a long time ago at school from the Latin teacher. He sighed when he said it and added: 'but it won't stop people saying: yee oldyee shoppee.' :lol:
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Re: English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

Postby tolgylop » Thu Jun 24, 2021 5:56 pm

This won't contribute to serious discussion of the original post, but I vaguely remember a funny TV sketch on the subject. A researcher was curious about why early printers used "Ye" for "the" and "f" for "s". So, he got access to a time machine and visited Benjamin Franklin's printing shop. He arrived at the shop, where the sign said "Ye Olde Print Shoppe" and knocked on the door. Promptly, Franklin opened the door and asked "May I help you, fir?"
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Re: English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

Postby Dragon27 » Thu Jun 24, 2021 6:16 pm

Just in case anyone wanders (although it's pretty common knowledge), it was a joke about the so-called long S. The long S looks deceptively similar to the letter "f" (in lower case): ſ. It only lacks a small detail (the horizontal bar in the middle). In some typefaces it even has a small nub, that looks similar to this bar, but only on the left side. Some of the variant forms can be seen in this picture.
For the modern reader this similarity is confusing at first (the brain automatically recognizes the letter as f): ſinfulneſs, ſold, etc.
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Re: English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

Postby Ug_Caveman » Fri Jun 25, 2021 10:34 pm

Le Baron wrote:There was a bit about this on an episode of QI.



Always nice to re-watch Lee Mack getting irrationally annoyed about that (or was that 'i before e'? Might have been both actually :lol: )
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Re: English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

Postby Le Baron » Fri Jun 25, 2021 10:36 pm

Ug_Caveman wrote:Always nice to re-watch Lee Mack getting irrationally annoyed about that (or was that 'i before e'? Might have been both actually :lol: )


Oh yes the i before e. I thought Fry was hard on him with that. :lol:
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Re: English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

Postby jeffers » Sat Jun 26, 2021 9:35 am

I always take QI with a grain of salt. Stephen Fry has a tendentcy to exaggerate how "false" popular myths are. The first example I noticed was the episode with the brontosaurus and he said something like: such a creature never existed. In reality it is a lot more complicated than that.

The name brontosaurus was certainly in dispute, and it is certainly true that the skeleton originally displayed as a brontosaurus had the head of another dinosaur. Stephen Jay Gould argued in "Bully for Brontosaurus" that even if the original skeleton is an apatosaurus, there's nothing wrong with applying the popularly held name. However, now the majority opinion seems to be that the original skeleton is different enough to warrant its own name, and the name brontosaurus has been restored to favour (perhaps still with some controversy).
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Re: English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

Postby jeffers » Sat Jun 26, 2021 9:43 am

Back on topic, from what I understand the title should be "Ye olde shoppe was always THE olde shoppe". When I was forced to read Chaucer in middle English I was told to pronounce the final E's like the final E's in German words, e.g. alte, Deutsche, etc. So the E is pronounced, but NOT the way most English speakers say it today. oldeee shoppeeee.
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Re: English: Ye olde shoppe was always THE old shop

Postby verdastelo » Sat Jun 26, 2021 11:30 am

Quite a coincidence! I learn 17 days later than DaveAgain that Y in "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe" is actually a disfigured thorn. The source is The Writing Revolution of Amalia E. Gnanadesikan.

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