This began with the practice of addressing kings and other aristocrats in the plural. The practice of matching singular and plural forms with informal and formal connotations, respectively, is called the T–V distinction, and in English it is largely due to the influence of French. After the Norman Conquest, which marks the beginning of the French vocabulary influence that characterised the Middle English period, the singular was gradually replaced by the plural as the form of address for a superior and later for an equal. In Old English, the use of second-person pronouns was governed by a simple rule: þū addressed one person, ġit addressed two people, and ġē addressed more than two. This substituted orthography leads most speakers of Modern English to pronounce definite article "ye" as /ji:/ ("yee"), when the correct pronunciation is /ðiː/ ("the") or / ð ə/ ( listen). The "thorn" character was supplanted during the later phases of Middle English and the earlier phases of Early Modern English by the modern digraph "th". Thus, the letter y was substituted owing to its similarity to some medieval scripts, especially later ones. Medieval printing presses did not contain the letter thorn. Thus, the article The was written Þe and never Ye. The lower letter is thorn, commonly written þ but which in handwritten scripts could resemble a "y" as shown.
"The" was often written " " (here the "e" is written above the other letter to save space, but it could also be written on the line). "Ye" is also sometimes used to represent an Early Modern English form of the definite article "the" (pronounced /ðiː/), such as in " Ye Olde Shoppe". While its use is archaic in most of the English-speaking world, it is used in Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, and some parts of Ireland to distinguish from the singular "you". In Middle English and Early Modern English, it was used as a both informal second-person plural and formal honorific, to address a group of equals or superiors or a single superior. Ye ( / j iː/) is a second-person, plural, personal pronoun ( nominative), spelled in Old English as " ge".
#Ye olde tunesmith free#
Look up ye in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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