Re: "write him" was Re: More questions

Tristan McLeay scripsit:

> > This is a
> > sound change in the 17th-18th century that mostly got backed out,
>
> Really? I thought it was earlier than that? Words like 'farm' and 'star'
> come from forms with an -e- in them, but I understand that the -a- form
> exists in ME?
An editing error.  I meant to write "sound change that mostly got backed
out in the 17th-18th century".  Anyway, the backout did not extend to
words whose spelling had changed, and even in the early 19th century
Noah Webster was still trying to promote the spelling "marcy" instead of
"mercy" (American speech remained archaic, as in some ways it is archaic
to this day).

"Sergeant" did not revert in any variety AFAIK; in a few cases, the shift
split a word into two:  person vs. parson, university vs. varsity.

The modern editions, at least, of ME works that I have seen write ferme,
sterre.

http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/english/fajardo/teaching/eng520/emodeng.htm
is a good summary of the changes from ME to EModE.

E.A. Abbott (the author of _Flatland_) wrote a _Shakespearean Grammar_
that explains EModE from the viewpoint of (Victorian) ModE in exhaustive
(and exhausting) detail; it's online at
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0080
Mirrors are available at perseus.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de, perseus.uchicago.edu,
and perseus.csad.ox.ac.uk; just replace the "www.perseus.tufts.edu" in
the above URL.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan      jcowan@reutershealth.com
Be yourself.  Especially do not feign a working knowledge of RDF where
no such knowledge exists.  Neither be cynical about RELAX NG; for in
the face of all aridity and disenchantment in the world of markup,
James Clark is as perennial as the grass.  --DeXiderata, Sean McGrath