In a lot of old printed manuscripts, the word "þe" was typeset as "ye" when the press ran out of þ's. I've also seen words like "world" typeset as "vvorld" when the press ran out of w's.
I'm not sure I'd call it an "alternate spelling", though. The reader was supposed to look at the page and see the correct spelling. He could even correct it by hand using a pen. So it's more along the lines of an "alternate typesetting", or perhaps a "tolerated typo".
'ye' is actually 'þe' (which is pronounced the same as the), however in the Tudor period the shorthand for 'þe' looked an awful lot like 'ye' because their script was so fancy, so people got confused and started writing 'ye' instead.
Not to be picky, but Þþ is the unvoiced sound (as in think and thorn) and Ðð is the voiced sound (as in the and this). These letters are still retained in Icelandic (and Ðð in Faroese).
Pronunciations change over time. Þ is supposed to make the sound found in "think" and "thorn", but at one point pronunciations changed so that when that sound was found at the beginning of a word it changed to the consonant found in "this" and "that". Ð and Þ were interchangeable in Old English.
Agree too with irish14. A BBC survey showed "If" to be the most popular poem written in the English language. How come only 14% of jetpunkers have heard of it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_note#History_of_note_names : "In Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Romanian, Greek, Russian, Mongolian, Flemish, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Turkish notation the notes of scales are given in terms of Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si rather than C-D-E-F-G-A-B. These names follow the original names reputedly given by Guido d'Arezzo, who had taken them from the first syllables of the first six musical phrases of a Gregorian Chant melody Ut queant laxis, which began on the appropriate scale degrees. These became the basis of the solfege system. "Do" later replaced the original "Ut" for ease of singing (most likely from the beginning of Dominus, Lord), though "Ut" is still used in some places. "Si" or "Ti" was added as the seventh degree (from Sancte Johannes, St. John, to whom the hymn is dedicated). The use of "Si" versus "Ti" varies regionally."
I feel like "Australia" isn't a very good hint for "Oz." Aside from the fact that I've literally never heard that anywhere before, it would make a lot more sense as a hint for Australia's common abbreviation AU. How about making it a Wizard of Oz reference instead?
It doesn't help that Julie Andrews things you "sol" with a needle pulling thread. Probably where the confusion started. Sol is a very common crossword answer as well.
Actually that's a pretty common misconception. The "Y" in Ye, is actually not a "Y" at all. It's an archaic letter called "thorn" which was a letter that by the 15th century looked similar to a modern "Y." The thorn is the letter that actually give us the "th" sound. It used to be its own letter but because of over hundreds of years of sloppy transcriptions, the thorn started to look like "Y" so the "Y" would be substituted for it until eventually, like other archaic letters, the thorn faded into obscurity. So the next time you walk by "ye olde drug store" you too can be a pendant and call it "the old drug store" just like it was originally intended.
Im surpised at the low percentages !! (I got 25 right but knew bo aswell, just couldnt get to it in time) most of the ones below 50% i would ve expected to be near 80%
Hear ye and Come all ye faithful; I'm not sure that the word "the", plugged into those phrases, really works. I suspect that ye actually means something else?
As I understand it, they are two different words: ye (with a proper y), being the archaic second-person plural pronoun, as opposed to ye (the 'y' being a thorn), referring to the article 'the'.
I'm not sure I'd call it an "alternate spelling", though. The reader was supposed to look at the page and see the correct spelling. He could even correct it by hand using a pen. So it's more along the lines of an "alternate typesetting", or perhaps a "tolerated typo".
come all ye gentlemen.
come all the gentlemen.
come all you gentlemen. (Sounds better, right?)
After a bunch of furrowing of the brow I eventually figured out that Xi could possibly be Qi... but I never did land on Gi.
Not "Sol"... haha
It's a tad bogan and over used
it is almost like saying what is usa, i ve never heard of it
Like Ozzie Man?
Well, you have now 🐨
I get the use of Oz, but I doubt it's more common than AU.
"AU - Australia. Often referred to as the Commonwealth of Australia."
"AU, the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code of Australia."