JW Kennedy (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} dr_phlog) wrote,@ 2006-06-21 13:22:00 |
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Antique speak
I got "A Book of Middle English" not too long ago and I've enjoyed slogging my way through the texts. It's slow going, but I feel like a really cool guy - learning Middle English and all - which says a lot about what I think is cool.
Wearing cardigan sweaters and smoking a pipe, that's totally cool.
Going bald is the epitome of coolness.
Staying indoors and letting your skin get pasty & translucent: very cool.
I wanted to learn Old English (which is another thing entirely, a completely different language from Modern - "New" - English) and decided that Middle English would be a good first step (since ME is halfway in between OE and NE and is therefore only a partially different language.) I have a plan in which one of my cartoon characters speaks Old English in a story.
Came across some interesting info: there are three letters we used to have in English, which have become obsolete and been removed from the typeset. I can't show them to you of course, because they aren't in the font. Two of them stand for the sound of "th." One is called "eth" and was borrowed from Old Norse; it's supposed to be a "d" with a line through the vertical ascender, but in modern typesets that include it, it looks more like a backwards 6. This letter was the first one to go out of style.
The other "th" letter was called "thorn" and it was derived from runic alphabets which were native to the British Isles. It looks like a "p" with an extra ascending stem, or a "b" with an extra descending stem. Oddly enough, Medeival scribes often wrote this letter as "y" or a mark indistinguishable from "y" ... when people began printing with movable type, many fonts were made on the Continent (particularly in Italy) where people spoke Latinate languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc) which didn't have "thorn" in their alphabet. So printers used "y" as a substitute, which is the reason why historical tourist destinations have places called "Ye Olde Shoppe." It's not supposed to be read "ye" - that's silly ... the "y" is standing in for the lost letter "thorn" and the sign actually says "The Olde Shoppe."
The last lost letter is called "yogh." It looks exactly like the numeral 3 (in fonts where the top hook of the 3 is pointy) or a fancy cursive script "z" with a long, curving tail. Yogh represented the consonant "y" or the soft "gh" and was still in use (in words such as "li3te" "ri3te" and "e3e") as late as the 1700s, after "thorn" and "eth" had been forgotten.
I suppose "long s" (popular up through the early 1800s) could also be considered a lost letter. In handwritten script (the US Constitution, for example, or even as late a document as Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation) this looks like a graceful, looping "f" that goes above and below the line of text. In print, it often WAS a lowercase "f" sometimes (but not always) without its crossbar. The rule seems to have been that capital "S" always looks normal, and "s" at the end of a word always looks normal. But anywhere WITHIN the word, and at the beginning of a word (as long as it wasn't the capital at the beginning of a name or sentence,) "s" would be written long - except in the case of a double "s" when the first one would be written long and the second one would be normal. In the handwritten draft of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Lincoln only used long "s" in the double-s situation (for words like "ifsued" and "reprefs") but wrote it normally at all other times.
Now don't say you never learned anything from my LiveJournal.
I got "A Book of Middle English" not too long ago and I've enjoyed slogging my way through the texts. It's slow going, but I feel like a really cool guy - learning Middle English and all - which says a lot about what I think is cool.
Wearing cardigan sweaters and smoking a pipe, that's totally cool.
Going bald is the epitome of coolness.
Staying indoors and letting your skin get pasty & translucent: very cool.
I wanted to learn Old English (which is another thing entirely, a completely different language from Modern - "New" - English) and decided that Middle English would be a good first step (since ME is halfway in between OE and NE and is therefore only a partially different language.) I have a plan in which one of my cartoon characters speaks Old English in a story.
Came across some interesting info: there are three letters we used to have in English, which have become obsolete and been removed from the typeset. I can't show them to you of course, because they aren't in the font. Two of them stand for the sound of "th." One is called "eth" and was borrowed from Old Norse; it's supposed to be a "d" with a line through the vertical ascender, but in modern typesets that include it, it looks more like a backwards 6. This letter was the first one to go out of style.
The other "th" letter was called "thorn" and it was derived from runic alphabets which were native to the British Isles. It looks like a "p" with an extra ascending stem, or a "b" with an extra descending stem. Oddly enough, Medeival scribes often wrote this letter as "y" or a mark indistinguishable from "y" ... when people began printing with movable type, many fonts were made on the Continent (particularly in Italy) where people spoke Latinate languages (French, Spanish, Italian, etc) which didn't have "thorn" in their alphabet. So printers used "y" as a substitute, which is the reason why historical tourist destinations have places called "Ye Olde Shoppe." It's not supposed to be read "ye" - that's silly ... the "y" is standing in for the lost letter "thorn" and the sign actually says "The Olde Shoppe."
The last lost letter is called "yogh." It looks exactly like the numeral 3 (in fonts where the top hook of the 3 is pointy) or a fancy cursive script "z" with a long, curving tail. Yogh represented the consonant "y" or the soft "gh" and was still in use (in words such as "li3te" "ri3te" and "e3e") as late as the 1700s, after "thorn" and "eth" had been forgotten.
I suppose "long s" (popular up through the early 1800s) could also be considered a lost letter. In handwritten script (the US Constitution, for example, or even as late a document as Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation) this looks like a graceful, looping "f" that goes above and below the line of text. In print, it often WAS a lowercase "f" sometimes (but not always) without its crossbar. The rule seems to have been that capital "S" always looks normal, and "s" at the end of a word always looks normal. But anywhere WITHIN the word, and at the beginning of a word (as long as it wasn't the capital at the beginning of a name or sentence,) "s" would be written long - except in the case of a double "s" when the first one would be written long and the second one would be normal. In the handwritten draft of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, Lincoln only used long "s" in the double-s situation (for words like "ifsued" and "reprefs") but wrote it normally at all other times.
Now don't say you never learned anything from my LiveJournal.
