English is soooo confusing!

by Rick Blechta

Sorry about missing last week’s Tuesday post. I was on holiday and completely forgot it was Tuesday until it was Wednesday. My sincerest apologies to everyone!

On to this week’s topic…

Actually it’s from a post I did here nearly twelve years ago. Recently, my wife and I were discussing the vagaries of the English language. (Yes, we actually do stuff like that.)

Honestly, I don’t know how anyone learns to speak English. It is just such a confusing language with variations, unexpected pronunciations, rules that make no sense, rules that are completely ignored, and of course, odd anachronisms. It’s all confusing enough for a native speaker. My hat is off to the millions who have accomplished the feat of learning English as a second language.

First, here’s my August 2007 post (if you care to read it): And Sometimes Y

Sorry to say the two URL links I gave no longer work. I guess the episodes they referenced were taken down because they were too old. Too bad. They were darned interesting. If I can find what CBC did with the episodes of this great show, I’ll let you know.

So anyway, my darling wife and I were discussing “thorn”, “the letter that bombed out of the English language”. In case you want to know, it looked like this:

An explanation: thorn started off looking a “p” grafter on to an “I”. As time went on, writing it sort of got “sloppy” (my guess) and it mutated into what now looks sort of like a “y”. Spoken, thorn sounded like what we are familiar with as the diphthong “th”.

Eventually, someone decided that it might be better to drop thorn from the alphabet and actually write the sound as “th”. However, use of thorn carries on to this day — mistakenly. When one sees “Ye Olde Pie Shoppe”, for example, what you’re seeing is a thorn. That “ye” is actually the original spelling of “the” and should be pronounced that way.

Then my wife’s and my discussion got on to what the meaning behind “Hear Ye!” —that familiar cry of, well, town criers — might actually be. My wife posited that maybe they were actually saying “Hear Thee!” and that the “y” was actually a thorn while the second “e” of thee got dropped somewhere along the way. It made sense to me, but in this era of scientific doubt, innuendo, and fake news, I had to find out for sure.

My wife’s theory came crashing down after a bit of research. Here’s the link to an article on what the meaning of hear ye is: https://www.quora.com/What-was-meant-by-the-town-criers-hear-ye-hear-ye

Okay, got that cleared that up, but the history of the English language threw us yet another unexpected curve, to whit: “you” plural was actually originally “ye”?

My head is swimming. I have to go take a nap…