or we still can't print a þ? ...
a rant.before i rant let me say I butcher the english language every day but this has annoyed me almost endlessly so i'm gonna rant. the target of this annoyance is two fold first If you own a place that contains ye, olde, shoppe or anything of the sort this is to you. i loathe your idiotic attempt to be cute, british, quaint, old-fashioned, or the like Second all those of you who pronounce them IPA:/ ji:/
and IPA:/ ʃɒpi;/ instead of IPA: /ðiː/ and IPA:/ ʃɒp:/ ...
The y in this ye was never pronounced (y) but was rather the result of improvisation by early printers. In Old English and early Middle English, the sound (th) was represented by the letter thorn (þ). When printing presses were first set up in England in the 1470s, the type and the typesetters all came from Continental Europe, where this letter was not in use. The letter y was used instead because in the handwriting of the day the thorn was very similar to y. Thus we see such spellings as ye for the, yt or yat for that, and so on well into the 19th century. However, the modern revival of the archaic spelling of the has not been accompanied by a revival of the knowledge of how it was pronounced.
the Middle English shoppe, comes from Old English sceoppa(treasure house) whitch is prounounced IPA:/ ʃɒpə/ in middle english the IPA:/ ə/ sound was dropped making it IPA:/ ʃɒp:/
thus "þe middle shoppe" I would be fine with, as long as people pronounced it "the middle shop". if they wanted "the old shop" it would read (much less elegantly) "þe eald sceoppa". While i'm at it I wish people would stop axeing people things and start asking them again!
Finally must admit I have no right to be annoyed by these things I just am.