Ye Olde Mispronunciation

The "ye" in Ye Olde Bookshop and other mildly nauseating names isn't - and never was - pronounced "ye". Our ancestors pronounced it "the".

​So why write "ye", ye ask (that second one was the nominative "ye", as in "O, ye of little faith"). I'll tell you. The letter "y" was a printer's adaptation of an Old English character called the thorn, used to represent the "th" sound. It looked like this: þ. "Y" was allegedly the nearest character available in the Roman alphabet, which makes you wonder if our forebears had ever seen the letters b or p.

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