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题目材料：
The Middle English language arose in the years following the Norman Invasion in 1066 and lasted until the late fifteenth century; its development over these years was marked by a sizable reduction in inflected forms, continental influences on vocabulary, and a gradual disappearance of several characters, including ash, eth, yogh, thorn, and wynn. Of these, the thorn is notable for its particularly unusual decline in English. Borrowed from the Old Norse runic alphabet, thorn (T t) is a dental fricative, similar to th in Modern English, and can be either voiced (as in th in English breathe) or voiceless (as in th in English breath). By the fourteenth century, however, th was being increasingly used in thorn's place, and the shape of thorn itself began to change, coming to resemble most closely the letter Y, which would later replace thorn entirely. This led to confusion surrounding the late Middle and early Modern English definite article ye, which is even now frequently used anachronistically in names of establishments to give them an "older" or more rustic feel. However, the ye found in texts from the late Middle English is, in fact, identical to the in pronunciation -- Y was simply used as a replacement for thorn in writing, in large part due to the lack of thorn on printing presses imported from the continent.
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