Re: isle > ile?

Barry Garcia wrote:
>
> I was looking at a book I had borrowed from my school's library, and in
> it, there is a French map of the Philippines dating from 1682. What struck
> me was that instead of ile, they used isle, for island (not odd in and of
> itself). It got me to wondering, was the s still pronounced then?
Nope.  :-)  What happened was that Latin _insula_ had become, in Old
French, _ile_.  Later, people stuck the _s_ back in for etymological
reasons, making it _isle_.  Then, when the French Acadamy came along,
they replaced all those silent s's with circumflexes, so you had ile ->
isle -> île.  :-)

That's also why _s_ was stuck into *English* "isle", and, via false
etymology, "island".  Island, in reality, is derived from Old English
_Iegland_ < _ieg_ = island + _land_ = land.

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