The ye in Ye Olde Tea Shoppe was never really pronounced ye
Those quaint shop signs reading Ye Olde are built on a misreading. Early Modern English writers used the old letter thorn for the th sound, so the word was simply the, and thorn later came to be printed looking like a y. Abbreviations have been reshaping written language, and confusing readers, for thousands of years.
The Latin root brevis means short, and shortening takes several forms. Contractions drop letters, marked in English with an apostrophe, as in I'm. Initialisms string together first letters, like FBI or BBC. In ancient times carving letters into stone was laborious, which encouraged economy, and short forms could also serve secrecy. Roman inscriptions almost always contain at least one; a lone A might mean field, friend, year, gold or grandfather depending on context, and COS stood for consul.
Scribes copying the Old English poem Beowulf leaned on shorthand marks for and and since so that little space was wasted. Later, fashion took over. During the rise of philology abbreviation became stylish in academic Britain, and a century before that a craze for it began in Boston and spread across the United States; the word OK is generally credited as its surviving legacy.
Text messaging revived the habit in the 1990s. Original SMS messages allowed at most 160 characters, spawning an informal shorthand sometimes called Textese, in which at least one word in ten of a typical message is shortened. Twitter's 140-character limit pushed the trend further. Some acronyms become ordinary words entirely and lose their capitals: radar, laser, sonar and scuba all began as initials.
Punctuation remains contested. American English usually adds a full stop, as in Dr. and Mrs., while The Guardian and The Economist ban them altogether. Hart's Rules puts a stop after words cut short at the end but not after those trimmed in the middle. AMA medical style drops nearly all stops, keeping one in No. to avoid confusion with the word no, and American traffic rules keep them off road signs except for compass directions.
Source: Abbreviation
