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This has nothing to do with physics, but you know how sometimes kitschy shops have signs
where "the" is spelled with a "Y"? Ever wonder where that came from? Ancient runes.
When people started writing in old English, the sounds [þ] and [ð] were represented
by a symbol called thorn. As in, "thorn-O-R-N". The use of a digraph, that is, two separate
letters, to represent thorn was only introduced by the French and their crazy "way-more-letters-than-necessary-spellings"
after the Norman invasion.
So English scribes started using "T-H" to spell newfangled French words like "theatre",
"Esther," and "neanderthal", and in the meanwhile became sloppier and gradually stopped writing
the top part of thorn out of laziness. So when printing presses started showing up in
England in the late 15th century and their European typefaces didn't have stamps for
the letter thorn, creative printers decided that "Y" was close enough, plus it saved them
one letter's worth of valuable space over the more state-of-the-art "T-H". Thus, they
would abbrev. "the" as Y-E, "that" as Y-T, "this" as Y-S, and so on, like this excerpt
from the mayflower compact, or "ye olde philadelphia mint."
And that's where "the olde shoppe" spelling comes from… so when you hear people pronounce
Y-E as "yee", you might want to remind them that "ye" in old english means "you all"…
and as cool as it is, I'm not sure "y'all old shop" conveys the "Merry Old England"
vibe they're going for.