Les ennemis de Dieu voulurent la vaincre. Ils voulurent la faire servir le diable.Įulalia was a good girl. Une bonne jeune-fille était Eulalie. Belle de corps, elle était encore plus belle d’âme. Here are the first two lines of the Séquence de Sainte Eulalie, a poem that dates from around 880 and is one of the oldest surviving Old French texts:īuona pulcella fut eulalia. Hopefully you’ve found this interesting, and can rejoice in correcting your friends whenever they say “ Ye old _.The earliest French isn’t all that recognizable either. As is so often the case, there are simple, pragmatic reasons for some of the major changes in English. Once printing came along, y was often used instead of the thorn, simply because many type fonts were imported from Germany and Italy and didn’t feature the thorn. though it was still never pronounced like it. As printing hadn’t come about in Europe yet, most literature was handwritten, and in some writers’ scripts, the thorn was much more like a y. It lost its ascender (the little bit that sticks out on top), coming to resemble something between a y and a p. As the thorn became less popular, its shape gradually began to change too. The thorn began to fall out of favour in English in the 14th century, as more and more people began to use th to represent the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds the thorn was used for, as we still do today (though the thorn is still used in modern Icelandic. Huh!īut why use a y instead of this thorn you refer to, I hear you ask? Well, I’ll tell you that too. So Ye Olde English is actually pronounced the same as The Old English. It could be used to represent two similar consonant sounds: /θ/, as in thing, or /ð/, as in the. It is in fact, an old letter called a thorn (well, to be pedantic, it’s a y substituting for a thorn) which was used in Old and Middle English. Derived from an ancient Nordic rune, the thorn normally looks like this: Þ, þ (upper and lower case respectively).

It seems reasonable to assume (as I did for a long time) that Ye is pronounced with a y sound (as in you) at the beginning of the word, but here’s the thing:

How do you pronounce that phrase? Some people might argue about whether the e in Olde should be pronounced, but no-one would dispute how to pronounce the other two words.

Letter thorn old english font