Have ye wondered about those quaint signs with “Ye”? Ye Old Tea Shop. “Ye” is an archaic form of “you all”. But how strange: You All Old Tea Shop.

What is that “ye” in Ye Old Tea Shop? “Ye” is an archaic form of “you all”. But how strange: You All Old Tea Shop.

It began in Scandinavia and Northern Europe where it was standard to us a þ symbol to represent a th sound. The symbol is called þorn, pronounced thorn.

Meanwhile, over in England, letters of the alphabet were being sculpted into forms for the new development of the printing press. But the foundries did not make a symbol for the thorn. When it came time to translate a Norse word such as þe (the), they substituted a “y” for the “þ”. The reasoning went like this:

At that time, people knew from context when “y” sounded like y or th. So that sign was pronounced The Old Tea Shop. But the thorn symbol fell into disuse in the 1700s, leaving us later generations to pronounce the thorn as we see it, as y.

It was a quirky work-around that has become a quaint thorn in ye sides.

More here.