Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate

In two different threads recently I've seen English people talking about money and, instead of using the pound sign '£'; they use this funny Polish letter: ''. Does the board mess this up automatically, or is this some new symbol everyone's using these days for a hypothetical currency?ABE: Well, that answers my question about the board's software. So what's with the s?Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.Edited by caffeine, : Edit2: accidental redundant word

That would be a hash.I've heard this called a pound sign plenty of times by Americans though, which raises another quick question! Where does that terminology come from?

When I say 'the pound sign' I am referring to the libra. When I write it in my posts, that's what I see. When anyone else writes it, however, I see neither the hash symbol nor the libra, but rather the funny capital L with a line through it like in the Polish city 'd'.Bizarre.

And yours too, if you're also seeing the . What I don't understand, if this is just how my browser displays things, is why it doesn't happen to the libra in my own post. Do you see £ as the same as in my post?

It didn't everywhere. Some British regional dialects stuck with 'ye', but that's mostly dying out now.The plural overtaking the singular dwise1 already explained - it was because the singular form began to be seen as rude since it was used for social inferiors. As for why 'you' became the dominant form (and this is purely my uniformed speculation), it might be because it was used more often in a sentence than 'ye'. When the distinction between cases lessened in English, this is the one that more people stuck with. Other accusative pronouns are often used as nominative in modern English now that case distinctions are almost gone.

I don't know. Both 'ye' and 'thou' survive in some dialects, so I've no idea which got pushed out first in standard English. The dative and locative cases died out in the transition to Early Middle English. The Old English forms are all listed on Wikipedia, and the dative ones actually seem more similar to our modern accusative forms than the old English accusatives.