One particularly cool aspect of the letter: you can see a late stage in the evolution away from the letter thorn (Þþ) in English. In the transcription in the article it's transcribed as 'y', and at this point it was no longer in general use but as an abbreviation for the word "the" it hung on for a while as a highly stylised thorn (which does kind of look like a 'y') and a superscript 'e'. If you view the image in a separate window you can see it most clearly in the last line ("ye prises") and also two lines up from that ("ye others").
You might have heard about the general phenomenon (it's the reason people going for an old-timey look prefix stuff with "Ye Olde") but it's cool to see it "in the wild", so to speak.
Yes! If I'm recalling correctly, "þ" was always pronounced "th" and was eventually replaced with the digraph "th" in print, so the definite article "þe" should properly be pronounced and transcribed as "the".
On the other hand, the pronoun "ye" ("Judge not, lest ye be judged") actually is spelled and pronounced with a "y". English is confusing. :)
Is this the whole story though? I am a Yorkshireman (northern county in England) and we still colloquially use "thee" and "thou", (the latter more normally pronounced "tha").
"Judge not, lest thee be judged" would fit with the initial "y" being a thorn character.
English orthography has retained a lot of history!
Nowhere near that old, but I remember a fun moment when I was a kid and living in an old house (in the UK). While redecorating we found some old folding window-shutters that had been covered over, and they were packed in with scraps of newspaper. The scraps described Germans reaching Paris and stern telegrams from the British Government telling them to behave themselves. It was from the Franco-Prussian War, 1870.
Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity
This is cool tech stuff! It's just not explicitly related to computing. How much techier can you get than the language used to communicate all the other tech stuff?
Is it the change in the English language over time?
The types of things that were on the list, compared to what's considered normal today?
Is it the fact that it just shows the month + year, vs YYYY-MM-DD-HH-mm-SS.XXTZ like we must have now?
Is it the idea of what appeared to be a letter that might have been posted via mail to some other place in advance of the courier which would retrieve the goods requested?
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My point is that there are a number of reasons why this could have been posted here on HN, but no indication of any of those was given.
Because when the question asked is, "Why is this story on HN?", there's no way to tell whether you're asking "Why is this non-technical, non-belonging story here?", which is highly disfavored, and "What precisely interested the submitter about this story?", which is, well, not terribly important.
No idea why you were downvoted. I think the reason you haven't got a good answer is because samclemens isn't answering and the rest of us don't know his (or her, or its) reasons.
You might have heard about the general phenomenon (it's the reason people going for an old-timey look prefix stuff with "Ye Olde") but it's cool to see it "in the wild", so to speak.