Date: Sun, 5 Nov 2006 07:03:28 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Bill Moran <wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: digression: There is no "ye" Message-ID: <20061105050328.GF1264@kobe.laptop> In-Reply-To: <20061104205321.d309c51c.wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> References: <20061104045607.GA5653@thought.org> <20061104205321.d309c51c.wmoran@collaborativefusion.com>
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On 2006-11-04 20:53, Bill Moran <wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> wrote: > > There is no word "ye", and there never was. > > Word origins is a hobby of mine, and I found it pretty difficult to > figure out where "ye" came from, because it never existed. > > What _did_ exist, was a letter in old English called a "thorne". The > thorne looked a lot like a capital "Y" (with a horizontal line through > it) and had the sound of "th". When the thorne fell into disuse, > later readers would think sentences said "we went to Ye bar to drink > wiY friends". > > Since "the" is liable to be the most common word in the English > language, this fell into a more general belief that in olden times, > the word "ye" was used instead of "the". > > Anyway, it's a bit of non-BSD trivia. Sorry for the noise to those > who aren't interested, and sorry that I don't know enough about groff > to help fix your problem. Quite interesting trivia, nevertheless. Thanks for taking the time to write all this down :)
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