Your comment sent me down a rabbit hole researching the thorn character, þ, and today I leaned:
[With] the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of ⟨y⟩ for ⟨Þ⟩ became ubiquitous, leading to the common “ye”, as in ‘Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe’. One major reason for this was that ⟨Y⟩ existed in the printer’s types that were imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while ⟨Þ⟩ did not. The word was never pronounced as /j/, as in ⟨yes⟩, though, even when so written.
Thanks, that was an interesting read!


OpenAI: hold my beer