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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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