Date: Sat, 4 Nov 2006 20:53:21 +0000 From: Bill Moran <wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> To: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: digression: There is no "ye" (was Re: what happened to groff?!!) Message-ID: <20061104205321.d309c51c.wmoran@collaborativefusion.com> In-Reply-To: <20061104045607.GA5653@thought.org> References: <20061104045607.GA5653@thought.org>
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On Fri, 3 Nov 2006 20:56:07 -0800 Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org> 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
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