Ye is not pronounced with entirely vowel sounds, as is often heard. Y was a thorn in middle and Early Modern English, which represented the “th” sound so it was still pronounced the.
(This was just a linguistics fun fact, in old English the thorn would have been written Þ or þ which ruins your joke, but wasn’t my intent :( )
Relevant bit: with the arrival of movable typeprinting, the substitution of ⟨y⟩ for ⟨Þ⟩ became ubiquitous, leading to the common “ye”, as in ‘Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe’. One major reason for this was that ⟨Y⟩ existed in the printer’s types that were imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while ⟨Þ⟩ did not.[5] The word was never pronounced as /j/, as in ⟨yes⟩, though, even when so written.[6]
Ye Olde English, you crooked nosed knave, dost thou speak it?
Fun fact:
Ye is not pronounced with entirely vowel sounds, as is often heard. Y was a thorn in middle and Early Modern English, which represented the “th” sound so it was still pronounced the.
(This was just a linguistics fun fact, in old English the thorn would have been written Þ or þ which ruins your joke, but wasn’t my intent :( )
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Relevant bit: with the arrival of movable typeprinting, the substitution of ⟨y⟩ for ⟨Þ⟩ became ubiquitous, leading to the common “ye”, as in ‘Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe’. One major reason for this was that ⟨Y⟩ existed in the printer’s types that were imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while ⟨Þ⟩ did not.[5] The word was never pronounced as /j/, as in ⟨yes⟩, though, even when so written.[6]