Since nobody else has said it yet, I feel compelled to point out that this is the character we are familiar with from the expression “ye olde curiosity shoppe” and the like. That’s right, it is and always was properly pronounced “the,” as @retepslluerb alluded to. I remember it being a huge a-ha! moment learning this in my history of English lit class. “Could it be that Woody Woodpecker was lying to me?!”
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But the guy behind the “movement” doesn’t want to call it “teh”.
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The article mentions by name (and description) several of the restaurants this guy owns. Pretty obviously he’s doing it for publicity for his existing businesses. His entire premise rests on Apple accepting his keyboard app in the app store, but Apple doesn’t allow apps like different keyboards and probably won’t anytime soon.
And then the listings for the Android app are funny - there are several different versions (for no apparent reason) and they all have 5-star reviews from the same user, and almost nobody has downloaded them.
This guy might be a good restauranteur (who knows), but this is a complete misstep.
All that aside, the article refers to twitter users as “correspondents” - I like that.
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Growing up in New England, there were no curiosity shoppes, but there were lots of Ye Olde Helpy Selfy Coin-op Laundromats and Ye Olde Self Service Parking Lots.
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Which of course became “ye” (of “Ye Olde Ale House”).
YeЋ.
In all seriousness though, I have enough trouble convincing people to not include it in alphabetization. I really want a consensus there before we make any sudden moves.
My Mac’s character editor–usefull for typing ð and þ-- says that Ћ is
Ћ
CYRILLIC CAPITAL LETTER TSHE
Unicode: U+040B, UTF-8: D0 8B
If the Latins ever decide to adopt it, I suppose it will acquire a new unicode code reflecting its new meaning.
Well, if we’re going to replace words with ideograms, why don’t we just switch to Chinese?
This is solving a problem that does not, in any conceivable universe, exist. This really just looks like some joker looking for attention.
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Sure it will. It will just have to be more like a Japanese keyboard where you type ‘th’ and the system converts it to the appropriate character or other non-English keyboards where you enter a certain key combination or press and hold keys (like on touchpads) to get diacritical marks. It’s no big deal when you are used to it.
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His argument about the ampersand having its own glyph is silly, as the ampersand started as a stylized “et” in italic script.
Not only that, how often do you see ‘&’ in a sentence? It usually only shows up as shorthand in written notes, or in advertising.
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Or we could just get rid of “the” and “a/an” altogether. They contribute nothing to meaning, and languages like Russian don’t have them but work just fine.
Yeah. Well, more generally from the Middle English spelling of “the” that used the version of the thorn character “þ” that was later confused with “y,” not necessarily with the “abbreviated” single-character version of “þe” (strictly speaking, it’s not an abbreviation at all, since it contains both the characters needed to spell “þe/the”). Also there were the (actually abbreviated) versions of “that” ( 
) and “thou” ( 
) in usage.
No.
[I really feel I should be able to post just ‘no’]
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Right, but you’ll notice that in a lot of “ye olde…” signs, the e of ye has a tendency to be raised.
In standard German typography it’s not even supposed to be used anywhere but in company names likes, “Wolfram & Heart“.
Though some typographers disagree of course.
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