Language - History of English Trivia

I just realized there is some syntactical ambiguity in the title of this post. To be clear, this is Trivia about the History of English, not a History of English Trivia, as might be implied in the title.

Just some interesting facts I learned taking a class on "The History of the English Language" my senior year in college (which was also the source for this much longer and more filled out post).

I learned that i and j, as well as u and v, were not distinguished in writing until the seventeenth century, so that one might write "Iack, liue, and vnder" where we would write "Jack, live, and under." And even this was just a graphical change--they weren't really considered different letters until well into the nineteenth century, as shown by the fact that dictionaries did not separate them alphabetically, so that the word "iambic" might be set between "jamb" and "jangle" in an early modern dictionary.

Also, pseudo-antique signs with names such as "Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe" are simply prey to a typographical error--'Ye' was never used (in pronunciation anyway) as a substitute for "The". English in the early modern time still used the letter þ (called a 'thorn') to indicate a "th" sound, but Continental type fonts didn't have such a symbol, so a "y" was substituted, with a superscript "e" above it to indicate that it was standing in for þ and should be read "The." We've since misinterpreted the “y” with a superscript “e” as being pronounced "Ye", but with no historical accuracy.

Finally, people complain about the practice of using the plural "they" to stand in for the singular "he or she" when the gender isn't specified, but there are precedents for this. Our modern usage of "you" for both the singular and plural is a drastic simplification of the Middle English pronoun, where "you" only referred to people in the plural (and even more specifically, if you were referring to them as the object rather than subject of the sentence).[a] The singular for second-person was properly "thou" or "thee" (subject or object, respectively). Even in Early Modern English we maintained the distinction, though we started using "Ye" and "You" (still plural) as more respectful forms of the singular "Thou" and "Thee." You can see the distinction in Shakespeare. But eventually we just started using "you" for all second-person forms, singular and plural, subject and object. It seems possible at least that the plural "They," which in speaking we already use for the singular "he or she," could undergo a similar transformation.

I don't have the book with me at the moment, but I'm certain all of these bits and pieces are found in John Algeo's excellent History and Development of the English Language, which I've referenced below.

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Notes

[a] The subject of the sentence would be "Ye." 
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References

Algeo, John. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 6th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2010)