digression: There is no "ye" (was Re: what happened to groff?!!)

[Gary Kline]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 08:53:21PM +0000, Bill Moran wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Nov 2006 20:56:07 -0800
> Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org> wrote:
> 
> > 	Guys, 
> > 
> > 	This roff script is in a directory with ye-olden-English font,
> 
> There is no word "ye", and there never was.
> 
> Word origins is a hobby of mine, and I found it pretty difficult to figure
> out where "ye" came from, because it never existed.
> 
> What _did_ exist, was a letter in old English called a "thorne".  The thorne
> looked a lot like a capital "Y" (with a horizontal line through it) and had
> the sound of "th".  When the thorne fell into disuse, later readers would
> think sentences said "we went to Ye bar to drink wiY friends".
> 
> Since "the" is liable to be the most common word in the English language, this
> fell into a more general belief that in olden times, the word "ye" was used
> instead of "the".
> 
> Anyway, it's a bit of non-BSD trivia.  Sorry for the noise to those who aren't
> interested, and sorry that I don't know enough about groff to help fix your
> problem.
> 

	Well, maybe the gurus will be back on Monday.  I'm no scholar of
	the English language, but yeah, you're right on the money re the
	thorn character.  [ Ever watch Bergan Evans' broadcasts circa 
	late-1950's?  ]

	gary

> -Bill
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-- 
   Gary Kline     kline at thought.org   www.thought.org     Public service Unix