
17th Century Shopping List Discovered Under Floorboards of English Home - samclemens
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/seventeenth-century-shopping-list-discovered-under-floorboards-historic-english-home-180961986?no-ist
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blahedo
One particularly cool aspect of the letter: you can see a late stage in the
evolution away from the letter thorn (Þþ) in English. In the transcription in
the article it's transcribed as 'y', and at this point it was no longer in
_general_ use but as an abbreviation for the word "the" it hung on for a while
as a highly stylised thorn (which does kind of look like a 'y') and a
superscript 'e'. If you view the image in a separate window you can see it
most clearly in the last line ("ye prises") and also two lines up from that
("ye others").

You might have heard about the general phenomenon (it's the reason people
going for an old-timey look prefix stuff with "Ye Olde") but it's cool to see
it "in the wild", so to speak.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Yes! If I'm recalling correctly, "þ" was always pronounced "th" and was
eventually replaced with the digraph "th" in print, so the definite article
"þe" should properly be pronounced and transcribed as "the".

On the other hand, the pronoun "ye" ("Judge not, lest ye be judged") actually
is spelled and pronounced with a "y". English is confusing. :)

~~~
Wildgoose
Is this the whole story though? I am a Yorkshireman (northern county in
England) and we still colloquially use "thee" and "thou", (the latter more
normally pronounced "tha").

"Judge not, lest thee be judged" would fit with the initial "y" being a thorn
character.

English orthography has retained a lot of history!

~~~
kwhitefoot
Unless the you in question was plural. See
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thee](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thee).

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mrec
Nowhere near that old, but I remember a fun moment when I was a kid and living
in an old house (in the UK). While redecorating we found some old folding
window-shutters that had been covered over, and they were packed in with
scraps of newspaper. The scraps described Germans reaching Paris and stern
telegrams from the British Government telling them to behave themselves. It
was from the Franco-Prussian War, 1870.

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ruffrey
Does that mean the floorboards or joists are also over 400 years old? Being
from the West coast of the US I find that equally amazing for some reason.

~~~
ChristianGeek
"Some of these buildings are over 20 years old!" -Steve Martin, L.A. Story

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bleair
Better images of the actual list described:
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4145360/400-year-
old...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4145360/400-year-old-shopping-
list-discovered-Knole-House.html)

~~~
kwhitefoot
There's a lot wrong with the Daily Mail but one thing they often do well is
showing good quality pictures.

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whatnotests
Pretty cool, but why is this being submitted here? (Not that it shouldn't be -
just curious why.)

~~~
whatnotests
Wow...I was simply asking "why" is this here?

Is it the change in the English language over time?

The types of things that were on the list, compared to what's considered
normal today?

Is it the fact that it just shows the month + year, vs YYYY-MM-DD-HH-mm-
SS.XXTZ like we must have now?

Is it the idea of what appeared to be a letter that might have been posted via
mail to some other place in advance of the courier which would retrieve the
goods requested?

\---

My point is that there are a number of reasons why this _could_ have been
posted here on HN, but no indication of any of those was given.

So I was wondering.

Sheesh.

~~~
Semiapies
Because when the question asked is, "Why is this story on HN?", there's no way
to tell whether you're asking "Why is this non-technical, non-belonging story
here?", which is highly disfavored, and "What precisely interested the
submitter about this story?", which is, well, not terribly important.

