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Origin and history of ye

ye(pron.)

"you," in addressing more than one, Old English ge, nominative plural of 2nd person pronoun þu (see thou).

Sometimes in Middle English of individuals: occasionally derisively or as a social insult, but often of a social superior, parent, God, Christ, Mary, by a man of his lady or a woman of her husband, also in politeness to a stranger and of anyone from whom a favor is desired or has been received.

Germanic cognates include Old Frisian ji, Old Saxon gi, Middle Dutch ghi, Dutch gij. Outside Germanic, cognates include Lithuanian jūs, Sanskrit yuyam, Avestan yuzem, Greek hymeis.

Altered, by influence of we, from an earlier form similar to Gothic jus "you" (plural). The -r- in Old Norse er, German ihr probably is likewise by influence of the 1st person plural pronouns in those languages (Old Norse ver, German wir).

For more, see you.

The confusion of the two forms, and the use of you as nom. began early mod. E., and is conspicuous in the Elizabethan dramas. In the authorized version the Bible (1611), in which many usages regarded as archaisms were purposely retained, the distinction between ye, nom., and you, obj., is carefully preserved. [Century Dictionary]

ye(article)

old or quaintly archaic way of writing the. The -y- is a 16c. graphic alteration of þ, the Old English character (generally called "thorn," originally a Germanic rune; see th) that represented the -th- sound, as at the beginning of thorn.

The characters for -y- and -þ- closely resembled each other and confusion of them is evidence in 14c.-15c. texts. In Old English and early Middle English handwriting a dot sometimes was added above the -y- in a bid to keep them distinct.

In late 15c., the first printers in English used types founded on the continent that did not have a þ in their sets. So y, as the letter that looked most like it, was substituted when setting type. But the words remained "th-" and the character was not meant to be pronounced with any of the sounds associated with -y-.

Ye for the (and yt for that) continued in manuscripts through 18c. The practice revived 19c. as a deliberate antiquarianism; the Ye Olde ______ Shoppe construction is attested by 1872 and was mocked by 1896.

also from 16c.

Entries linking to ye

digraph representing a sound found chiefly in words of Old English, Old Norse or Greek origin, but unpronounceable by Normans and many other Europeans. In reconstructed PIE origins, the Greek -th- and the Germanic -th- descend from different sound roots.

In Greek, -th- at first represented a true aspirate (T + H, as in English outhouse, shithead, etc.). But by 2c. B.C.E. the Greek letter theta was in universal use and had the modern "-th-" sound.

Latin had neither the letter nor the sound, and the Romans represented Greek theta by -TH-, which they generally pronounced, at least in Late Latin, as simple "-t-" (passed down to Romanic languages, as in Spanish termal "thermal," teoria "theory," teatro "theater").

In Germanic languages it represents a sound common at the start of words or after stressed vowels. To indicate it in alphabetic writing, Old English and Old Norse used the characters ð "eth" (a modified form of -d-) and þ "thorn," which had been a rune. Old English, unlike Old Norse, seems never to have standardized which of the two letters represented which of the two forms of the sound ("hard" and "soft").

The digraph -th- sometimes appears in early Old English writing, on the Latin model, and it returned in Middle English with the French scribes, driving out eth by c. 1250, but thorn persisted, especially in demonstratives (þat, þe, þis, etc.), even as other words were being spelled with -th-.

The advent of printing dealt its death-blow, however, as the first types were imported from continental founders, who had no thorn. For a time y was used in its place (especially in Scotland), because it had a similar shape, hence ye for the in pseudo-historical typographical affectation Ye Olde _____ (it never was pronounced "ye," only printed that way; see ye (article)).

After the Renaissance, English writers saw that some words inherited from French or Latin with a t- had been th- in the original Greek. The -th- was restored in amethyst, asthma, pythoness, orthography, theme, throne, etc.); it failed in acolyte. Over-correction in English created unetymological forms such as Thames and author. Caxton (late 15c.) has thau for tau, and compare Chaucer's Sir Thopas (topaz). The earliest form of Torah in English was Thora (1570s). Yet some words borrowed from Romanic languages preserve, on the Roman model, the Greek -th- spelling but the simple Latin "t" pronunciation (Thomas, thyme).

the

definite article, late Old English þe, nominative masculine form of the demonstrative pronoun and adjective. After c. 950, it displaced earlier se (masc.), seo (fem.), þæt (neuter), and probably represents se altered by the th- form which was used in the masculine oblique cases.

Old English se is from PIE root *so- "this, that" (source also of Sanskrit sa, Avestan ha, Greek ho, he "the," Irish and Gaelic so "this"). For the þ- forms, see that. The s- forms were superseded in English by mid-13c., with a slightly longer dialectal survival in Kent.

Old English used 10 different words for "the," but did not distinguish "the" from "that." That survived for a time as a definite article before vowels (that one or that other).

In adverbial use, in clauses such as the more the merrier, the first the is a different word, a fossil of Old English þy, the instrumentive case of the neuter demonstrative (see that), used with relative force: "by how much more ____, by so much more ____." Of the common phrases, the sooner the better, is by 1771; the less said the better from 1680s.

In emphatic use, "the pre-eminent, par excellence, most approved or desirable," by 1824, often italicized. With relations (the wife, etc.) by 1838.