Ye (pronoun)
Ye (IPA: /jiː/) is a second-person, plural, personal pronoun (nominative), spelled in Old English as "ge". In Middle English and early Early Modern English, it was used to address equal or superior people. While its use is archaic in most of the English-speaking world, it is used in Newfoundland, Northern England, Cornwall, and Ireland to distinguish from the singular "you".
"Ye" is also sometimes used to represent an Early Modern English form of the word "the" (traditionally pronounced /ðiː/), such as in "Ye Olde Shoppe". "The" was often written "
" (here the "e" is written above the other letter to save space but it could also be written on the line). The lower letter is thorn, commonly written þ but which in handwritten scripts could resemble a "y" as shown. "Thorn" is the predecessor to the modern digraph "th". The word The was thus written Þe and never as Ye. Medieval printing presses did not contain the letter thorn so the letter y was substituted owing to its similarity with some medieval scripts, especially later ones. This substituted orthography leads most speakers of Modern English to always pronounce "ye" as /ji:/ even when "ye" is not intended as a pronoun but as the definite article and the pronunciation is /ðiː/ or 
i/ðə/.
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