Mingin'

Thanks to Rob for drawing this article to my attention.

Lucky they said old English and not Old English, because it actually didn't appear until the language had morphed into what we'd call Middle English. It was also found in a germanic prefix to verbs that we had that indicated the past participle, and the prefix is still present in modern german as "ge-".

But that's great. It directly parallels the thorn character ( þ ) being rendered in modern printing as a Y but which was pronounced as "th" as in "think", thus "ye olde tea shoppe" ought to be pronounced just the same as "the old tea shoppe".

Also interesting is that they say it is pronounced like the "ng" in "singer" rather than e.g. "mingle." My wife, being brought up in the North-West, pronounces all instances of "ng" as in "mingle" so the example will probably be lost on people from up there.