Q: How was the definite article that we now see in the faux-archaic names of ye olde shoppes actually pronounced in Old English and Middle English when it was written with a thorn?
A: The article “the” was originally spelled se in Old English and pronounced like a clipped version of “say” without the glide at the end. That spelling and its variants continued into Middle English.
However, the Old English article was also spelled ðe and þe during much of this period. The Anglo-Saxon runes eth (ð) and thorn (þ) were pronounced “th,” so ðe and þe did indeed sound like our word “the.”
The first example for the article “the” in the Oxford English Dictionary is from an early ninth-century will in the Kentish dialect of early Old English:
“Æðelnoð se gerefa to Eastorege” (“Æðelnoð the reeve at Eastry”). From “Will of Æðelnoð & Gænburg,” Anglo-Saxon Charters (1956), by Agnes Jane Robertson.
The first example in the OED for the definite article spelled with a “th” sound is from an Old English gloss, or translation, inserted in the 10th century between the lines of Latin in the Lindisfarne Gospels.
The Anglo-Saxon scribe who wrote the gloss translated the Latin “Herodes rex” in Matthew 2:3 with an eth rune, as “Herodes ðe cynig” (“Herod the King”). The Latin itself dates from the eighth century.
The first OED example written with a thorn is from a gloss inserted during the 10th century in the eighth-century Latin of Matthew 2:9 in the Rushworth Gospels.
The scribe translated the Latin “Stella quam uiderant in oriente antecedebat eos” as “þe steorra þe hiae ær gesægon in eastdæle foreeade hię” (“The star that they had seen earlier in the east went before them”).
The first OED example for “ye” used in the sense of “the” appeared in the Middle English of the late 14th century. It’s from a 1389 list of ordinances governing guilds in Norwich, England:
“alle ye bretheren and sisteren” (English Gilds: The Original Ordinances of More Than One Hundred Early English Gilds, 1892, by Joshua Toulmin Smith and Lucy Toulmin Smith).
Why was the article written as “ye” here, not þe, and how was it pronounced? When the printing press arrived in England in the 15th century, printers didn’t have metal type for a thorn and substituted the letter “y,” but “ye” was pronounced as “the.” That use of “ye” for “the” probably inspired the faux-archaic names of ye olde shoppes.
As for the pronoun “ye,” one of four archaic forms of “you,” it was originally spelled ge in Old English and pronounced like the first two letters of the word “yes.” By early Middle English, it was spelled ȝe, with the “y” sound expressed by the yogh rune (ȝ).
The four ways of expressing “you”-ness in Old English were the singulars “thou” and “thee,” and the plurals “ye” and “you.” The Anglo-Saxons used “thou” and “ye” as subjects, “thee” and “you” as objects.
The earliest OED citation for the pronoun “ye” (spelled ge here) is from the epic poem Beowulf, believed to date from the early 700s: “Hwæt syndon ge searohæbbendra?” (“Who are ye armor-clad weapon-bearers?”).
The first Oxford example for the ȝe spelling of the “ye” pronoun is from the Ormulum (circa 1175), a collection of early Middle English homilies: “Hu ȝe muȝhenn lakenn godd” (“How ye may sacrifice to God”).
The dictionary’s first example with the “ye” spelling is from Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century prose version of the legends of King Arthur:
“My fayre felawes wete ye wel that I will torne vnto kynge Arthurs party” (“My fair fellows, know ye well that I will side with King Arthur’s party”).
We’ll end with the expression “ye gods,” which Oxford says appeared in the 16th century and was “used to express indignation, disbelief, or amazement, esp. in a consciously archaic or grandiose way.”
The OED’s first citation is from The Paradox of Marcus Tullius Cicero (circa 1543), a translation by the English grammarian Robert Whittington of Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum (“Stoic Paradoxes”).
In the passage cited by the dictionary, Whittington translates the Latin “O di immortales” as “O ye goddes immortall.”
(Note: All the senses of “ye” mentioned in this post are now pronounced YEE.)
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