Ye in old signage was really the word the, printed with thorn instead of the letter y.

The longer version

Blackletter thorn looks close enough to a y that early modern printers, short of the right sort, reached for y instead. So the definite article appeared as ye on signs and in cheap print, and readers who had never seen thorn took the letter at face value.

The mistake then hardened into a style. Modern shop fronts reproduce ye as a quaint old spelling, and the word is pronounced with a y sound as if it had always been an archaic form of you. Nothing about it is old in that sense: it is a typesetting substitute for the, and the th pronunciation is the original one.

Where this entry sits

This category gathers small surprises about the English language, from odd spelling rules to words that quietly hide their own history. Expect palindromes, punctuation oddities, borrowed terms, and the strange ways writing systems record spoken speech. The full list sits on the Words and Language page, where every entry is listed in order.