Trivia

Hard

The “Ye” In Archaic Names Like “Ye Olde Shoppe” Is Derived From A Middle English Symbol Called A?

Ash
Yogh
Thorn
Wynn
Hanging sign for the "Ye Olde Candlemaker Shoppe" from the Simpsons.
Fox Broadcasting Company/The Walt Disney Company

Answer: Thorn

Unbeknownst to many people, the “Ye” that appears in the names of purposely archaic locations like “Ye Olde Armorie” at the local renaissance festival, is not pronounced “yee” as in “bee”, let alone with any “y” sound at all, but should actually be pronounced like the English article “the”, as in “The Olde Armorie”.

How exactly did such a strange spelling come about? Like all good jaunts into the history of English, it’s a sprinkling of organic language development over time and a sprinkling of happenstance. In Old English, some dialects of Middle English, Gothic, Old Norse (runic alphabet), and persisting in modern Icelandic alphabets, you’ll find a symbol, þ, called a “thorn”. In Old English and Middle English, the symbol stood for the “th” sound—as found in “thick”, “the”, and “there”—but was later replaced by the modern digraph “th”.

So where does “y” come into play? There was a period of time where the thorn symbol was still in use, but its shape grew less distinctive with the letter losing its ascender. As it started looking more like “ƿ” and less like þ—it was easy to substitute a “y” for the “ƿ” since the modified thorn symbol of the day looked a whole lot like a “y” with a closed top (and in many fonts the two were nearly indistinguishable).

Another reason for the shift was that “y” existed in the printer’s type fonts imported from Germany and Italy, while thorn did not. In short order, the substitution became ubiquitous in English printing and “ye” as the article “the” was permanently cemented into the history of the English language with the 1611 printing of the Kings James Version of the Bible, where it appeared frequently in a very widely distributed printed work.

Lest you think that every instance of “ye” is being said incorrectly, however, know that there is an appropriate time to yell “ye” as in “bee” at a renaissance festival. While “ye”, the article, should be pronounced as “the” (unless your goal is to ham it up by saying it incorrectly), “ye” as in the archaic second person plural pronoun is pronounced with a long vowel—the “ye” in “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” should be pronounced like “yee”.

More Trivia Questions

Trivia

Hard

What Was The First Volunteer Distributed Computing Project?

Trivia

Hard

Which Star Wars Actor Became Enormously Wealthy Off The Film’s Royalties?

Trivia

Easy

Which Common Vegetable Was Originally A Deep Purple Color?

Trivia

Hard

Cloudflare Uses Which Of These Items To Generate Random Cryptographic Data?

Trivia

Very Hard

In Which Game Did The Famed “Konami Code” Cheat First Appear?

Trivia

Very Hard

The First Recorded Use Of The Word “Pixel” Was Used To Describe?

Trivia

Hard

NPR Radio Shows Have A Very Crisp And Bright Sound Profile That Is Optimized For?

Trivia

Hard

The Smell Left On Your Hands After Handling Coins Is?

Trivia

Very Hard

Nintendo’s First Hit Toy Was?

Trivia

Hard

When Her Reign Is Over, How Do Worker Bees Kill Off The Queen Bee?