whatilearned
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
TIL that the reason old pubs have “Ye Old” instead of “The Old” is because when the printing press was invented in Germany, they didn’t have any letters for the old letter Thorn, which made a “th” sound. Thorn ultimately was replaced with Y because they looked similar until the Th start was popular.
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Ye olde Pube
So when the thorn was a common letter, were we not using what we now call ‘Y’?
This was on QI
yat’s ye fact, Jack
Btw, this is also why english speakers say you when basically every other nearby cognate is either tu or du
It’s because we actually used to say thu, spelled thou, but those non thorn having germans and their printing press necessitated some creative letter substitution
For anyone interested in Scots, this is apparently also happened to a Scots letter which made something like a y sound, but instead was replaced with Z, giving us the name Mackenzie in the process