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

On Saturday, January 15, 2005, at 08:41 , Tristan McLeay wrote:

> On 15 Jan 2005, at 7.01 pm, Ray Brown wrote:
]snip]
>> 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,
I believe it did.

> 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?
In some places, e.g. Scotland, it was confused with |z|, e. Menzies
/'MINIz/ (yes, I know a spelling pronunciation is common, especially in
non-Brit anglophone lands), capercalzie /kep@(r)keli/ etc.
> (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/.)
Yep - yogh was used both for syllable initial [j], from Old English 'soft
g', and for the syllacle final ich-laut (spelled -igh in the Norman style
spelling) & ach-laut (otherwise spelled -ugh). As an initial, it came to
be respelled |y| as it still is in modern English.
>
> 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?).
Not sure about the |w|. the spelling |uu| is certainly used on the
continent for the old Germanic /w/. In the Bayeux Tapestry the upper case
VV occurs often enough in Latin text for the spelling of William's name,
which was certainly not English at that time!

> Funny, then, that today we use the same base alphabet as French or German.
Not really, given the dominant position of Norman French in the centuries
following the conquest & England's close association with the continent
throughout the Middle ages.

[snip]
>> 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 agree, the use of |th| is one of the least difficult bits our strange
spelling. But I think a single sound is better spelled if possible with a
monograph rather than a digraph - but that is just a personal preference.

> (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.)
I doubt it   ;)

> 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.
I agree entirely - it is noteworthy that modern transcriptions of Old
English nearly always use |w| for the OE wynn (tho I met the occasional
text printed with wynn)

Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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"If /ni/ can change into /A/, then practically anything
can change into anything"
          Yuen Ren Chao, 'Language and Symbolic Systems"