tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Feb 14 15:34:00 1995
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Re: ye and thee
>Date: Tue, 14 Feb 1995 17:08:38 -0500
>Originator: [email protected]
>From: "Lawrence M. Schoen" <[email protected]>
>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."
Hmm. This is strange: looks like I'm going up against Lawrence.
I think you're wrong here, Dr. S. I recall talking about this in a class I
once took in the history of English. It seems that thorn and edh were used
interchangeably for *both* "th" sounds, when they were used. In fact, we
know the old name for the edh character in English: it was called th{ae}t
(with an ae ligature), pronounce liked "that" only with an *unvoiced* th.
(maybe this had to do with the fact that the word "that" was often
abbreviated as a *thorn* with a crossed ascender, which resembles a
backwards edh). It is a common misconception that edh and thorn differed
in voicing, but apparently this wasn't the case (looking in my textbook and
that seems right). Basically, what happened was that they needed a way to
represent the "th" sound, which the Latin alphabet couldn't do well for
them. So they invented a new letter. Unfortunately, they invented two
letters, so there was conflict. Edh didn't last long (nor did wynn, the
early letter used for the "w" sound before the invention of "w"), but thorn
actually lasted *quite* a while, even into early printing days (though it
was printing that really killed it: nobody wanted the expense of an extra
piece of type when they could get away with using t and h). And as
mentioned above, it survived in two words: the (spelled thorn-e usually
with the e superscripted) and that (spelled thorn-t with a superscripted
t). And the form changed until it looked like a y, hence "ye olde
shoppe"... for which there is *NO* evidence to pronounce the "y" like in
"yes."
>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.
Not in sound.
>Lawrence
~mark