about þ
i need to rant. leave me alone for a second, i just need to get this out (again. for the millionth time. im fine, dont worry)
have you ever seen/heard "ye olde" whatever? did you ever in your head/out loud pronounced it "yee"? chances are you have
thats wrong and ahistoric, and no one would ever pronounce it that way before it started being used as a "historic way to spell the"
why did it ever appear in the first place then, you might be asking
this image
this image is the reason. you might've never seen this and might be very confused about what this has to do with anything. thats fine. i'll explain
a very often feature of medieval manuscripts is that people didnt really want to write out every small repetitive word over and over and over again. so they made shortcuts for them! for ease, i'll show it on another one, but i'll return to "ye" very quickly, dont worry
a modern example of a scribal abbreviation (what i described in the previous paragraph) is e.g. % < -- this! instead of having to tediously write out "percent" every time, you just whack % instead! so convenient! awesome!
this was always done, and there are a million and five different abbreviations everywhere, and it's fine. the image i showed is an example of one of them. if i were to write it and not just show it to you, it would be þe. that looks different, you might say. and you wouldnt be wrong
the letter (þ) i used is called thorn. it is an old english letter read as the "th" sound in the (there are other old english letters that youve never seen and theyre infinitely interesting, if it is anything that might interest you, check them out). it was used in english up to basically the 17th century, although it started kinda dying out in the 14th century and being replaced by "th". the final blow to it was that printing presses imported into england did not have þ and so it just faded out
okay thats fun, but where did we get ye. i still didnt answer that. thats fine
in medieval england, the letter thorn became very similar to the letter y (as you can see in the image. the letter in the image is þ as hard as it might be to believe. i know it doesnt really look similar, but just... trust. it's true and i cant really change that) and so when the printing presses rolled around, people still wanted to keep using their abbreviations and continued using "ye" instead of "þe" as it looked basically the same. but everyone still knew "oh, thats just a substitution for thorn, it should still be read as the." nobody would read that as "yee." ye also existed as its own word (old form of you) and that would be pronounced "yee" but unless you want to say "you old tavern" saying "yee olde" is kinda dumb
funfacts for the road: þe was not the only commonly used abbreviation containing thorn. there was also thou (þu), this (þs) or that (þt)
and last info, if you wish to use this beautiful letter, you can either painstakingly copy and paste them, or Icelandic still uses it and has it on its keyboard, so you can just quickly shift between keyboards (or even just get used to Icelandic and use it. it's not what i do as my language's keyboard has shit tons of custom letters that i need for my language, but it's something you could do)
