I am not necessarily talking about the “ye” in Kanye. I don’t know if that would be worth our time and effort to donate that much energy. I think he has it all covered himself – so let’s move on…

I am talking about when you go to a pub or boutique store that for some reason you find has “ye” in the name. It is meant to sound all Old English and gothic or something isn’t it? I dunno. But what I do know it that most of them could probably just use “the” instead and stop wasting our time.

The strange irony of this situation is that what they have effectively done by writing “ye” is write “the”. Confused? Well, as it turns out, the correct pronunciation for “ye” is the way we now pronounce “the”. We are spelling t wrong too. The letter is a kind of P or Y-looking things that is called a “thorn”. Apart from sounding cool, thorn is a letter unto itself that accounts for the “th” sound, and when written with a little tiny “e” on top like a hat, it is pronounced “the”.

So this is where “ye” comes from and, as we said, it is technically pronounced “th”. So why can’t we just have a new letter in the alphabet? Or rather, an old-new letter; the thorn?

Some people want to bring in an entirely new letter that basically just looks like hybrid of the two letters, not to replace “th” but to use instead of the whole word “the”. The idea might have some merit. The word “the” appears in eighty percent of all paragraphs written in the English language. It is the single most often used word in our language. So doesn’t such a dominant sound warrant its own individual letter?

Some people appear more passionate about the above than others. Australian restaurateur Paul Mathis has reportedly spent about $40,000 trying to get the ball rolling on the alphabet’s 27^th letter. I guess he would always have that legacy if it somehow came off. But I’m predicting that it will stay as it is. After all, considering that “the” is the most prolific of all the words, we are certainly very used to writing and typing it just the way it is.