| 词组 | ye |
| 释义 | ye I Ye was originally the nominative form of the second person plural pronoun. It contrasted with you, the oblique (accusative and dative) form. Around the middle of the 16th century the contrast began to break down, and the two forms became interchangeable. Wyld 1920 says that in the 16th century nominative you was much more frequent than ye as an accusative or dative. But in the 17th century ye was much more often found in object positions: • All of ye —Thomas Shadwell, The Sullen Lovers, 1668 • ... I'll be judge between ye —Aphra Behn, The Dutch Lover, 1673 • ... what think you now, of a fellow that can eat and drink ye a whole louis-d'or at a sitting? —George Farquhar, The Inconstant, 1702 It was also used in a reduced form—just a representation of the vowel, tacked to the end of another word: • Paints de'e say? —William Congreve, The Double Dealer, 1694 • Hark'ee, Oriana —George Farquhar, The Inconstant, 1702 Attached to the end of words like hark and thank, a remnant of ye has survived in various spellings. Ye by itself has survived, too, primarily as a dialectal variant of you: • '... I'll tell ye,' I says —H. N. Westcott, "The Horse Trader," 1898, in The Mirth of a Nation, ed. Walter Blair & Raven I. McDavid, Jr., 1983 • "... every damn man of ye...." —James Stephens, The Crock of Gold, 1912 • ... if a man is going to pay you he'll pay ye without too much dunning —Dock Franklin, quoted in Our Appalachia, ed. Laurel Shackelford & Bill Weinberg, 1977 • Straight man [at a Scottish music-hall performance]: "Why didn't ye cut him doun?" —Israel Shenker, N.Y. Times, 20 Oct. 1974 Strang 1970 points out, in addition, that in the 18th century, as you took over as the usual second person pronoun in all functions, ye continued in elevated literary use. Undoubtedly some of the elevated use was liturgical and ceremonial, and this too survives: • Hark ye, O, King Solomon, and all ye who hear me —Adoptive Rite Ritual—Eastern Star, rev. ed., 1952 And, of course, ye survives in deliberate archaizing, as in fiction set in the past: • "...Ye followed him secret-like, eh? Maybe he took ye for a spy from the Customs...." —Max Peacock, King's Rogue, 1947 • "Ye are idle, ye are idle," the Pharaoh reproved them —Joseph Heller, God Knows, 1984 See also you 3. II Students of English spelling are aware that part of its oddity derives from the fact that the earliest printers were working with manuscripts in which the spelling at least in part represented pronunciations that were no longer in use. These printers had brought their technology to England from the continent. The types they had—black letter, roman, italic—were European types, whose letters of the alphabet were those in general European use. Not in use on the continent were some of the runic characters still being used in Middle English. One such was the thorn (&), a character somewhat resembling a p, which stood for what the continental alphabets less efficiently spelled th. In 14th-century manuscripts, some scribes were writing a form of the thorn that was all but indistinguishable in shape from the letter y, and one of its most common uses was in the short forms of the, that, they, them, and the like, that the scribes used to save themselves writer's cramp. Early printers set these abbreviated forms as they found them, so that the short the would appear in print as, say, ye, and that as y'. So this early rendition of scribal the has given us the alternate form ye, typically used nowadays because of its conspicuous, antiquarian flavor with olde in the quaint-sounding names of various business establishments ("Ye Olde Antique Shoppe"). It would seem that few things could be less important than a disquisition upon the pronunciation of antiquarian ye, but a fair number of commentators have troubled themselves to remark upon the subject, and they have disagreed. Some have insisted that ye should be pronounced like the, others have noted and accepted that its far more common pronunciation is \\\\yē\\\\. This is not a matter to be taken seriously. We think you can safely judge for yourself how ye is to be pronounced in such facetious uses as still occur: • You are in ye olde desperate straits —Kathy Crafts & Brenda Hauther, Surviving the Undergraduate Jungle, 1976 • ... when ye olde faithful hoste, Alistair Cooke, introduces the author —Arthur Unger, Christian Science Monitor, 19 Nov. 1980 |
| 随便看 |
|
英语用法大全包含2888条英语用法指南，基本涵盖了全部常用英文词汇及语法点的翻译及用法，是英语学习的有利工具。