As students of archaic English will know, the letters “ye” can represent both the word ye as the plural of thee, and the word the using a variant glyph of the letter “þ” (thorn). The former is pronounced “yee”, while the later is pronounced like the word the.
At my church we sing the doxology:
Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise him all creatures here below
Praise him above ye heavenly host
Praise Father Son and Holy Ghost
(Punctuation deliberately elided, because how it’s punctuated might depend on the following question.) So, what is the word “ye” in the above poem? How is it pronounced?
My inclination is the “ye” is the plural of thee. Some quick Google searches seem to confirm that, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct.
I know we have some philologists, linguists, and generally well-educated people around here. Does anyone know the answer? (I’d ask people at my church, but I’m one of the few who speak English as a primary language and don’t trust their answers to esoteric questions about English.)
Hmm, so was there no difference in pronunciation between ye (archaic second person plural, nominative) and thee (archaic second person singular, accusative)? If y is equivalent to th, how come we once apparently had ye and thee existing in the language, with different though related meanings, simultaneously? In the 17th century, would thou and you have been pronounced the same?
Methinks the notion that the authentic, period pronunciation of the initial y in such words would always have been like a modern th may be a considerable oversimplification.
It’s not possible to know for sure, but by the time Thomas Ken wrote this in 1674, they were probably pronouncing ‘ye’ much the same as we generally pronounce it today, although ‘the’ would fit perfectly well.
Not really. There’s no good reason why þ was left out of the modern alphabet, but there’s no question that it stood for the ‘th’ sound and that Þe == the/thee. The Y is just a substitution of letter form, not sound.
I don’t know what evidence there is for a “yee” pronunciation before the advent of radio and the mass use of the word in fictional/pseudoformal settings.
ye, the plural of thou, has always been pronounced “yee”. In Old English, it was ge, most definitely pronounced with a “y” sound rather than a “th”. Suggesting that the plural of thou/thee is pronounced with a “th” sound is a hypercorrection of the error of mispronouncing the “ye” glyph of the with a “y” sound.
But it is not hard at all to make an educated guess when you know how Germanic pronouns work across different languages and times. Pronouncing both the same doesn’t make sense.
The way I read the line in the OP, the pronoun “ye” doesn’t fit because it is the nominative form (unless you read it as “Praise him above, ye heavenly host!” which seems weird.)
On the contrary, it makes perfect sense. Line one is a general injuction to praise God. Line two addresses earthly creatures, urging them to praise God. Line three addresses heavenly creatures, enjoining them to praise God, so the two lines complement one another. “Ye heavenly host” would be “you heavenly host” in modern English. And the standard punctation of the line confirms this reading.
The other clue is that this quatrain is an extract from a longer hymn ( “Awake, my soul, and with the sun”) in which the definite article is consistently rendered as “the”.
Agreeing with UDS that this is not a weird reading, and in fact the only one that makes sense in this context.
There are two possible readings of ‘Praise Him above the Heavenly Host’:
Praise H[e who is] above the Heavenly Host - this is odd phrasing, but not unknown poetically…but it’s strange in context, since He is above everything and everyone.
Praise Him [more than you praise] the Heavenly Host - this is a strange reading as it implies that people would need to be told to praise God more than the Angels.
Both also have an issue in that above ceases to correspond to ‘below’ from the previous line, as UDS noted.