Ye Olde Debunking

Have you ever wondered where "Ye Olde" spelling comes from? Today we unravel this thorny linguistic issue.

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• Category

  Education

[meow arg]

i clicked on this because i thought it said porn

[LFalch]

So when they wrote thy it became yy???

[charlie landtblom]

But it said thorn.

[MagnusBruce]

My understand is that spellings were standardised quite recently, so for a long time people would spell it however they felt like. Sometimes they'd add an extra 'e'. People that do it now are doing it so it seems archaic.

If you read old manuscripts a lot of the words are spelt phonetically and you have to read them out to actually understand what they're supposed to be.

[Rxist Prepps]

Þ is pronounced Thortn:(

the stop before the n is far more pronounced than you make it out to be (at least in icelandic... that language is closest to the old norse as far as i understand it)

[crashsitetube]

dang it! I thought this was going to be an instructional video about getting out of bed....

[chrisells222]

Porn...

[TheLivingHeiromartyr]

It would be convenient, but unfortunately that's not actually the case. The pronouns 'you' and 'ye' came into being in c. 1200, as slightly more polite versions of 'thou' and 'thee'. As time progressed, this distinction grew until it was considered extremely rude and contemptuous to use 'thou', and 'you' was used in all situations except when degrading or insulting someone.

'you' did not evolve out of 'thou' because of the 'þ --> y' typography, it came way before that. Just for your interest :)

[TheLivingHeiromartyr]

Firstly, the language being discussed here is early modern English. Now, early modern English had no standardized spelling until it began to evolve into modern English and the spelling was standardized by the English linguist Johnson in 1755.

Before Johnson, since most people couldn't write, English was still mostly just spoken, so spelling was of little importance and was neglected somewhat. Read some of Shakespeare's original manuscript, it's often very difficult to understand!

[ramiel555]

I tried to explain this and the pink light thing to people at work, and......I think it was so intellectual, that not only did they not get it, but I think it made some of them angry O.o

[ice velez]

i wish you we're my teacher

[ViceCash46]

So the Yogscast is actually pronounced as Thogscast? Get your stuff together British people.