'' In
Old English,
that did not exist, and was only represented by '
(the). It originated in the north of England sometime before the 1200s and spread around the country in the thirteenth century; it then rapidly became the dominant demonstrative pronoun. Before the writings of Ælfric of Eynsham, ' was normally regularized as '
in writing, but by the time Ælfric lived, ' was common. As a pronoun, was widely used in Old English, though it was later replaced by
wh- words. Where '
had only stood in for subjects of a clause, instead took on the role of both a subject and an object, and when ' and were both used, was always relative in orientation. The symbol (,
Thorn with stroke or 'barred thorn') was used as an abbreviation, before it was phased out by the Romantic (). During the latter Middle English and
Early Modern English periods, thorn, in its common script or
cursive, form, came to resemble a
y shape. With the arrival of
movable type printing, the substitution of for became ubiquitous, leading to the common
ye, as in '
Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe'. Thus replaced as the
scribal abbreviation to represent
that, as seen in the gravestone of
William Shakespeare: "". In
Middle English, ''
was entirely replaced by (among other representations), before again being replaced by the modern that
. Among all relative markers in the English language, including who, which
, whose
, and what
, that
—through its ancient form of ''—appears to be the oldest. In Old English translations of
Latin (but only sparsely in original Old English texts), the phrase '
is frequently used—typically meaning "only"—but its origins and characteristics are not well-understood. Frequently, the construction of ' was in the original Latin, which referred then to a following clause. The use of '
was for cases in which there was exclusivity (to distinguish between general and specific objects), but translators also used it in situations where exclusivity was already given through other syntactical elements of the sentence. In these texts, seems to be used pleonastically (redundantly), and it began to be used as an independent adverb. In the context of weather events, was never used, such as in the example sentence ' (translated as "that rains"). Similarly, for several centuries in Old English and early Middle English texts, the phrase (translated as "among that") persisted. In the hundreds of years of its existence, it was used infrequently, though the usage was stable. Even in Old English, usage of '''' ("while") was much more commonplace, with its frequency some six times as large as in a surveyed corpus. experienced
grammaticalisation (turning a word into a grammatical marker), and as a result of its low usage, possibly underwent a period of specialization, where it competed with other grammaticalised phrases. After
verbs such as
said, and more generally in introducing a
dependent clause, contemporary
English grammar allows the speaker to either include
that or to omit it. This construction—as in "I suspect (that) he is right"—is called the zero form when
that is not used. While there has been some analysis of the relative frequency of Old and Middle English usage of the zero form, these studies are of limited value, since they rely on unique
text corpora, failing to give a general view of its usage. In the late period of Middle English, the linguist Norihiko Otsu determined, the zero form was generally as popular as the form in which
that is included. The zero form was common in documents closely relating to speech, such as sermons, suggesting spoken English often omitted
that in these contexts. == Pronunciation ==