Re: USAGE: What happened to Anglo-Saxon letters? (was: Intro to Frankish)

On 15 Jan 2005, at 7.01 pm, Ray Brown wrote:

> On Thursday, January 13, 2005, at 07:55 , Rodlox R wrote:
>
> [snip]
>> (someone else pointed out that English remained the language of the
>> masses
>> both before and after the Norman Invasion in 1066.....well, what
>> happened
>> to
>> all the /ae/ and such Anglo-Saxon letters?  *curious*).
> /ae/ never existed. I assume you mean the letter 'ash' written as a-e
> ligature and denoting the sound /@/. The sound remained. We now write
> it
> simply as |a|.
/&/ and /&:/, actually. And TMK it merged with /a/ and /E:/ (with a few
/&/ -> /E/), so it was no longer necessary to have a distinct letter.

> The general population remain English-*speaking*, not English-writing.
> Indeed, the general population never _wrote_ till more recent times.
> After
> the conquest, the people who did the writing were Normans.
>
> When, a century or so later, we find English being written it uses
> Norman
> spelling conventions - hence our crazy English spelling! But at least
> one
> 'Anglo-Saxon' letter did survive, namely thorn, which did not disappear
> until the advent of printing.  The early printers, whose fonts were of
> German origin, did not have thorn & substituted |y| instead, hence "ye
> olde teas shoppe:  :)
I'm under the impression that eth survived a fair while too, and a new
letter was even created---yogh! Can't remember if yogh was ever printed
till modern times, though; I spose it wasn't, else why did it die?
(Yogh was based on the Irish/Old English g glyph and used for the
sounds Old English g was used for that Norman g wasn't, so /x/ and
/j/.)

It seems to me, though, that a huge number of novel letters were
created for writing English at one stage or another---æ (as a single
letter, rather than a ligature); thorn (as a roman letter); eth; wynn
(as a roman letter); yogh (as a letter distinct from g); even w I think
was made for English (or at least, ISTR uu was first used to spell
early OE /w/, moved to the continent, was replaced by wynn from the
Runic alphabet, before the Normans re-introduced <w>---can anyone
confirm this?). Funny, then, that today we use the same base alphabet
as French or German.

But on the subject of ash, Danish and Icelandic both use it. Seeing as
Icelandic had adopted the OE thorn and eth, I supposed they adopted the
OE ash, too. But in Icelandic, it's pronounced /ai/ (or similar). Is
the Icelandic then merely the old Latin ligature, or did it used to be
/&/ or something else? (I could imagine it was a fronted equivalent of
a backed á, and then whatever turned á into /au/ turned æ into /ai/.)
Also, how's it pronounced in Danish?

> But in the end they adopted the graphy |th| which the Normans had
> introduced as an aternative to thorn   :=(
Excepting of course the relative uniqueness of thorn, I don't see it as
anything lost. TH almost always represents one of /T/ and /D/ so it's
not a particularly difficult aspect of the English orthography. (I
wonder, though, if we could point out the savings in ink by using one
letter instead of two and get people to adopt it---considering, thanks
to Icelandic, most decent fonts already have thorn.)

As for wynn---I'll certainly say no big loss there! When P's used as
rarely as it was in OE, wynn's obviously okay, but with all the Latin
borrowings English has suffered since, I think W is definitely a
necessity.

--
Tristan.

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