Specimens of English literature from the 'Ploughmans crede' to the ...

INTRODUCTION.XlllSt. 299,1. 5. Very soon after this, the scribes began habituallyto form the character j? so indistinctly, that no differencewas made between it and the letter y. I denote thisby printing th in italics. Thus, in Sect. VII, 1.5, p. 68, theword ' thQ signifies that ' ye' is written in the MS., but the'is meant. In the same hne, the word thaV ^ signifies thatthe MS. has ' yV where the y means ih, and the a is onlyindicated by the / being a little above the line. Hence itis very common to find in old printed books the words ' y®,'''y^i yis,' which are to be read /ke, that, this, and not ye,yat, yi's, as many persons, with a comic ignorance, seem tosuppose.The character 5 has various powers. At the beginningof a word it is to be sounded as y, so that "^ard is our modernj/i^r^/ in the middle of a word it had a guttural sound,still represented in our spelling hy gh, as li'^t for light; atthe end of a word it either had the same sound, or stoodfor z. In fact, the character for z was written preciselylike it, although more sparingly employed ; we find, e. g.marchaunt^ for marchauntz, where the z, by the way, mustnecessarily have been sounded as s. This use of the characteris French, and appears chiefly in French words. Inearly French MSS. it is very common, and denotes z only.The characters v and u require particular attention. Thelatter is freely used to denote both the modern sounds, andthe reader must be prepared at any moment to treat it asa consonant. Thus the words haue, leue, diuerse are to beread have, leve, diverse ; where it will be observed that thesymbol appears between two vowels. The former is usedsparingly, but sometimes denotes the m.odern u, chiefly at