Ye olde procrastinations

Sometimes my procrastination tangents lead to interesting places.

"How The Immune System Works" was talking about how memory B cells confer life-long immunity to infection, and used the Swedish travels to the Faroe Islands as a case study.

I had never heard of the Faroe Islands so I looked them up on wikipedia.
It turns out they have a language called Faroese that's still spoken by about 60,000 people (I have an interest in obscure northern European languages -- I took a semester of Irish Gaelic one summer). That article mentions that when you use a Faroese keyboard, you can type Latin, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, etc. except the Icelandic letter þ is missing! Oh no!

I had seen this character before in the character map; I had occasionally used it for a tongue-sticking-out smiley (:-þ), so I was surprised to see there was a whole wiki article on it. It's called thorn. Not only is it used in modern Icelandic, it was used in early, middle, and early modern English. It's a "th" sound, so up to when the first bibles were being printed, the word "that" might be abbreviated with a thorn with a superscript t or even a crossed thorn. "The" was written thorn with a superscript e. Over the years, the written version of thorn in English had decayed to a character almost resembling a Y, so when the first printing presses were made, they just used the Y press for thorn. Thus, Ye, as in "Ye olde...." actually means "The olde..."

I love wikipedia.