A Thorn in my side

It's always bugged me when people try to be cutesy in an old-town way by putting up signs saying things like "Ye Olde Coffee House" or "Ye Olde Cinema" or something equally silly. For whatever reason, something always seemed wrong about it to me, and now I know why. It's because... well, it's because it really is wrong.

That "y" is supposed to be the letter Thorn -- Þ (uppercase) or þ (lowercase). Over time, the way the letter was written changed, until eventually it looked more like a backward "y" with a thin line on the top part. Easy to see why people copying old documents got confused and just wrote it as the letter Y, since Thorn was no longer in use in the English alphabet. So when you see a sign that says "Ye Olde...", just pronounce the word as "The" instead. That's how it was originally intended.

Jeez, I love the Internet for learning stuff like this...

Why "gh" is Weird In English

Holy cow! This has been bugging me for a long time, and for whatever reason, I never bothered to look it up. Why are some words spelled with a "gh" in them, but you rarely pronounce them like they're spelled? The "gh" is almost always either silent or pronounced like "f". Does that make any sense?

Turns out, and this should've been obvious, that "gh" is the English equivalent to the German and Gaelic "ch" sound, like in "loch" (Scottish for "lake") or "lachen" (German for "laugh"). It's that same throat-clearing sound you hear in Hebrew, for instance, or when Germans talk about themselves ("Ich"). Again, holy cow! It used to be pronounced in English, but as modern English lost that sound, the pronunciation became silent or changed a bit, usually to an "f" sound at the end of words.

That's... awesome.

I just happened to search Google and found this article. It's a great piece, and everybody should read it. Sorry if this is old news to you, but it was pretty exciting for me!

:-)

Okay, now go back to whatever you were doing...