Hacker News Reader

Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

I thought this would be about Old→Middle→Modern English, in which case the lost letters are Ƿ, ð, þ and æ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Alphabet

I think it's interesting that despite our access to this sort of information, a huge number of people still don't understand that "Ye Olde" was not pronounced "Yee" and rather "The".

I only learned that in university. I did a joint major in English and history, but it actually came up in a history module in an offhand comment by the lecturer. I’m not surprised it’s little known.

I know it's pronounced 'the', but 'yee' is more fun

“Yee oldy hat shoppy” is the most fun.

You forgot to throw “timey” in there too ;)

Milliner doesn't have the same ring.

What if it was a hatter and not a milliner?

Just mercurial madness

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q6EoRBvdVPQ

My immature side just thinks it's fun to write þorn.

To mean this song, I presume: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSZBIs0gs0E

Old English is just generally not a priority. There are only so many hours in the schoolday and so many schooldays in the year.

Need to teach kids to be self learners. I knew these facts about old English, but I wasn’t taught them in school. I learned them on my own.

Other kids know facts that you don't because people care about different things.

> Old English is just generally not a priority

“Ye Olde” is Middle English (or maybe even Early Modern)

Old English doesn’t look like English at all. To my eyes, it looks Scandinavian-even though I know it is closer to Dutch than to Swedish/Danish/Norwegian. Actually, the closest living relative to Old English (apart from its descendants) is Frisian, a minority language of the Netherlands and northern Germany.

It is because the Y was a character called 'thorn' and it symbol was Y drawn as a stick, pronounced the like the 'th' in the and thorn. Also s got reversed and became the z we know today. This article was written by someone who knows noYing.

Actually, the article ends with "The ampersand isn’t the only former member of the alphabet. Learn what led to the extinction of the thorn and the wynn." (which links to https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-alphabet/)

Not thorn. Thorn is the vertical bar with circle: unvoiced th.

It’s eth (voice on, like in pronouncing “that”).

Icelandic still uses both, didn’t replace both with ambiguous “th”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eth

If you're speaking, and don't pronounce it "yee", nobody will know that you're making a reference to the "Ye Olde" orthography.

Well, world is huge and amount of stuff you might not know is endless.

https://xkcd.com/1769/

That’s eth (voiced th), which was the greek letter delta with hash across the top, visible in Icelandic still, and some typographer used a Y at some point and overlooked the loop at the bottom.

Typos evidently perputuate!

Also yogh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh

There’s a politician in the UK called Menzies Campbell, his name is pronounced “mingis” because that “z” actually used to be a yogh

That explains why his nickname is "Ming"!

Very interesting! One of the most famous Australian prime ministers was known as "Ming" and now I know why.

> Menzies was proud of his Scottish heritage, and preferred his surname to be pronounced in the traditional Scottish manner (/ˈmɪŋɪs/ MING-iss) rather than as it is spelled (/ˈmɛnziz/ MEN-zeez). This gave rise to his nickname "Ming", which was later expanded to "Ming the Merciless" after the comic strip character

ESL learners would probably appreciate the visual split between voiced ð & voiceless þ from the th digraph that isn’t a dental fricative (e.g. Thailand, Thomas, Thames). With such a reform we could replace “the” with standalone “ð” which would bring symmetry with the single-character indefinite article, “a”.

Well, Ƿ & þ are covered in a separate article: https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-alphabet/

They mention those with links at the bottom of this article as well

Also from op site: https://www.dictionary.com/e/letters-alphabet/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com