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

[Bill Moran]

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.

-Bill