From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Nov 4 20:53:24 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2923416A407 for ; Sat, 4 Nov 2006 20:53:24 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from wmoran@collaborativefusion.com) Received: from mx00.pub.collaborativefusion.com (mx00.pub.collaborativefusion.com [206.210.89.199]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F4C343D6E for ; Sat, 4 Nov 2006 20:53:23 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from wmoran@collaborativefusion.com) Received: from working (c-71-60-174-60.hsd1.pa.comcast.net [71.60.174.60]) (AUTH: LOGIN wmoran, TLS: TLSv1/SSLv3,256bits,AES256-SHA) by wingspan with esmtp; Sat, 04 Nov 2006 15:53:22 -0500 id 00056403.454CFDC2.0000EE51 Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 20:53:21 +0000 From: Bill Moran To: FreeBSD Mailing List Message-Id: <20061104205321.d309c51c.wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> In-Reply-To: <20061104045607.GA5653@thought.org> References: <20061104045607.GA5653@thought.org> Organization: Collaborative Fusion Inc. X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 2.2.9 (GTK+ 2.10.6; i386-portbld-freebsd6.2) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Subject: digression: There is no "ye" (was Re: what happened to groff?!!) X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 04 Nov 2006 20:53:24 -0000 On Fri, 3 Nov 2006 20:56:07 -0800 Gary Kline wrote: > Guys, > > This roff script is in a directory with ye-olden-English font, 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. -Bill