PHOENICIAN SCRIPT

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Notice the teth (cross within a circle), which became the theta of the Greek alphabet. It has been a fairly consistant symbol down through the ages. Even the Old English had a character with the same vocal sound, which was written , very similar to our y, which caused the familiar "The Olde Sweet Shop" to look like "Ye Olde Sweet Shop". The initial was spoken with the "th" sound. In English, the digraph represents in most cases one of two different phonemes: the voiced dental fricative ð (as in "this") and the voiceless dental fricative θ (as in "thing").

Old English originally inherited the phoneme th in positions where other West Germanic languages have d and most other Indo-European languages have t (English thou, German du, Latin tu). In Old English, the phoneme represented by , like all fricative phonemes in the language, had two allophones, one voiced and one voiceless, which were distributed regularly according to phonetic environment. These were both written or printed as .

The modern "you" is actually derived from the earlier Old English ("thou"), due to the confusion of the digraph with the ordinary letter "y". I had long suspected this, but it took a little research on my part to make a solid confirmation of this fact. Of help, in this regard, was a reproduction of a Resolution of the General Court of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay passed in 1647. Other similar findings served to confirm the above contention beyond any doubt.