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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: Thou vs you
In-Reply-To: hellan@buskfuru.idt.unit.no's message of 19 Feb 1996 08:35:04 GMT
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Date: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 23:32:38 GMT
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In article <4g9cno$jg8@due.unit.no> hellan@buskfuru.idt.unit.no
(Jon Kaare Hellan) writes:

>I thought early printers cast their types themselves, so they wouldn't be
>confined to 127 standard ASCII glyphs or anything like that. Which explains
>the enormous number of glyphs found in typography. That makes your explanation
>rather unlikely.

The mistake here is in assuming that this was something done by *early*
printers.  The habit of "archaizing" signs is more 19th or 20th Century than
early.  The spelling of "the" with a thorn was long gone by Shakespeare's time,
and even a 17th Century printer of English would have been hard put to find a
thorn among his sorts.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
