tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 14 13:23:49 1995
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Re: ye and thee
- From: "Lawrence M. Schoen" <klirt>
- Subject: Re: ye and thee
- Date: Tue, 14 Feb 1995 16:23:49 -0500
In message <[email protected]> writes:
> So'wI' chu'Ha'lu'
>
> As long as sombody started the thread on this subject, does anybody
> remember the Old/Middle English runic letter "thorn" (looks like a p with a
> hard-on)?? It represented the fricatives \th\ or \_th_\. It latter became
> confused with the letter "y", which is how we come by the word "ye" instead
> of "the" which has nothing to do with "thee". "Thou" may also steam from
> {p}ou (I'm using {p} to represent the "thorn" character). Unfortunately I
> cannot cite any source material as I have lost many a book a few years
> back, and it been many a year since I've thought about it.
>
> Steve Weaver [email protected]
>
Just to quibble a bit (and because an old memory from my undergraduate course in
the history of English set off an alarm), the example you use of the letter
becomeing confused with "y" as in "ye" for "the" (not "thee") is the edth, not
the thorn. An edth, if memory serves, represented the the voiced fricative now
written as "th" (I'm only talking about the *voiced* "th" here, folks).
Uppercase or majescule edth looks like a capital "D" but with a short horizontal
line running through the left vertical line of the letter. That's not the
source of the confusion. The lowercase or miniscule edth looks like a lower
case "d" but the ascender (that's the vertical line going up) curves to the
left, like a leaning flower, and is then crossed near the top. If you
exaggerate the crossbar, and shrink the closed circle down, you get a cute
lowercase "y" with a closed tail. Hence "the" becomes "ye."
Not that *any* of this has *anything* to do with the warrior's tongue, but I
just wanted to clear up the confusion. Thorns are different from edths.
Lawrence
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