digression: There is no "ye" (was Re: what happened to groff?!!)
Reed Loefgren
rloef at forethought.net
Sat Nov 4 23:04:46 UTC 2006
On Sat, 4 Nov 2006, Gary Kline wrote:
> 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
>
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>
"Word origins is a hobby of mine, and I found it pretty difficult to
figure out where "ye" came from, because it never existed."
Errol Flynn?
r
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