when they used the word “ye” meaning “you”, that is because the modern eye doesn’t recognise that the antique informal “you”, is spelled “thee” or, more correctly, “þe”. the letter “thorn” – þ – is left over from when everybody spoke anglo-saxon, and when it became less common, printers replaced it with the letter y, which was still getting figured out where it was supposed to go in the alphabet at that time. there are two forms of the letter “thorn”, a capital – Þ – and a “lower case” – þ – and, these days, you need extra help to type them, because, while they’re probably part of your computer’s character set, it’s no longer something that you can access from the keyboard. the numeric character entity for capital letter THORN is is Þ and the small letter thorn is þ so you can put them on the web.

also, in middle english, the second person singlar pronoun “þe” and the second person plural pronoun “ȝe” (the letter “yogh” actually morphed into the modern letter “y”) were both printed as “ye” by middle-english printers who didn’t have the right type. that, along with the fact that americans didn’t particularly care for the informal “thee” meant that they started using the more formal “you” for both the second person singular and plural pronouns.

the english language has a whole bunch of letters that regularly get left out of alphabets, þ (thorn), ð (eth), ſ (medial s), and ʃ (esh) are a few examples…

yeah, i know, i’m a typography nerd…

hat-tip to ken whitley for the idea. 😉