Every mock-Tudor pub and lolly shop has a sign saying 'Ye Olde' something, and we all dutifully read it 'yee oldee', picturing peasants who talked like that. It feels like proof that English used to have a word 'ye' for 'the', some quaint old form we have since dropped.
The Y was never a Y. Old and Middle English had a letter called thorn, written like a spiky lowercase p and pronounced 'th', as in 'the' and 'this'. When the printing press arrived from Europe, the imported typefaces had no thorn, so printers grabbed the closest-looking letter they had, which was Y. So 'Ye' on the sign is just 'The', written with a substitute letter, and it was always pronounced 'the'. Nobody in a doublet ever said 'yee'. The 'ye' in 'hear ye, hear ye' is a genuinely different word, an old plural 'you', which is why the confusion survives. So the next time you pass 'Ye Olde Sweet Shoppe', read it as 'The Old Sweet Shop', because that is exactly what the sign-writer meant.
Reception
- Oxford English Dictionary: ye (the)PRIMARY
- Wikipedia: Thorn (letter)REFERENCE