That article is a decade old. I dyggyd it up this morning because — waiting for the blizzard — I wondered why the past tense of "snow" was not "snown," like the way the past tense of "show" is, at least sometimes, "shown."
From the article:
Here's an Oxford usage example from 1530, quaint but still comprehensible to moderns: "In wynter, whan it snoweth, it is good syttynge by a good fyre."
But here's something from just five years before, in a translation of Froissart's Chronicles, an account of the Hundred Years' War: "Also it rayned, blewe, & snewe, that it was a mervaylouse yvell wether."
And from just a few years later, "[I]t had snowen and frosen very strong."
This alternative verb lasted well into the 19th century. Oxford has this from 1870: "It never snew once last winter." And from 1877 (after the telephone was invented!): "It's snawn all way here."
I just love "mervaylouse." Mervaylouse yvell! I started to look up "yvell." What a weird word! Then I heard it in my head. Perfectly understandable. Somehow, on first look, it's easy to get "mervaylouse," though the spelling is weirder and contains the distraction of that wee creature, the louse, which makes me want to go off and read that Robert Burns poem....
Ha! whare ye gaun, ye crowlan ferlie!
Your impudence protects you sairly....
Ye ugly, creepan, blastet wonner,
Detested, shunn’d, by saunt an’ sinner....
Posts
34 comments:
Did they do this in writing? Because "It's snowen all week" strikes me as a sloppy pronunciation of "It's been snowing all week."
Someone help me out with syttynge.
Took me a minute to get yvell.
We are still waiting on that yvell weather up here in Door. Not a flake has flown. It hasn’t snown. I had expected to wake up to a wynter wunderland.
Sorry, I should read past the fold before posting. So they've done it, just not lately.
Something that's always struck me as interesting about language that I haven't seen examined--there is roughly as much time between us and Shakespeare as between Shakespeare and Chaucer, yet Shakespeare is not that different from modern English while Chaucer is barely recognizable as English at all--which means most of the change happened between Chaucer and Shakespeare and then, except for new coinages for new concepts, language evolution has largely stopped.
Did the printing press and published dictionaries destroy the "aliveness" of language?
Now, put your hands on your hips and pooch your lips out a little, looking up: You're Ed Sullivan ! "A reeeaally big Snew"
Polar Blast coming next week to most of the heartland.
I have always preferred, “it has besnoggen.”
syttynge is sitting, I think.
Too many interesting past tense forms are falling into desuetude: sneaked rather than snuck, lighted, not lit, slayed, not slew. I like the old forms.
Did the printing press and published dictionaries destroy the "aliveness" of language?
Certainly seem to have put the brakes on, at least in written language. Spoken language may be another matter. I might have to see if McWhorter's linguistics podcast treats this subject at all.
As to the spoken word, I sure wish elocution were still a subject... I'm trying to learn a language and have grown very cognizant of the diction of English-speakers, especially in service roles. How does an English learner possibly understand the supersonic featureless mumble of most flight attendants and restaurant servers?
I love "besnoggen"! Sadly, I live in southeast Texas and will seldom have occasion to employ it.
So ... they used to say. Or maybe they once said ... Or in the past it was said that ...
I wonder how current American English compares with (to?, stacks up against?) other languages with respect to flexibility, precision, clarity and regularity.
I wonder how current American English compares with (to?, stacks up against?) other languages with respect to flexibility, precision, clarity and regularity.
I've often wondered this. For instance - can you make that same very subtle tense distinction that you cite - "they used to say. Or maybe they once said ... Or in the past it was said that ..." - in ASL? How about just in an "easy" language like Spanish? And what conditions in a language's development determine how granular it gets with regard to verb tenses and forms? With nouns, I can see its being a matter of what you live with - the whole "16 words for snow" trope in languages the originated where snow is a big deal. But verb tenses don't seem to me to be so contextual across the board.
The English language is a wonderful thing. I cannot unforgot Shelley Berman's plurals of stewardess and jackass being stewardai and jackai.
The weather here in Vegas is unsnown. Why? That's unsnowable, a bit of arcane snowledge.
Reminds me of an old Peanuts comic strip from the 50's: Snoopy say "look, snew", CB asks "what's snew?", Snoopy replies "not much, what's new with you?".
"Did they do this in writing?"
Yes. All the old quotes collected in the OED were in writing.
And the quote for "snowen" is ""[I]t had snowen and frosen very strong."
So you can see "snowen" is the past participle, not the gerund — it means "snowed," not "snowing."
"Someone help me out with syttynge."
Sitting.
Still not much snow here... even though the city told its nonessential workers to stay home.
Birches said...
"Someone help me out with syttynge."
The 'y' in Middle English was usually pronounced like the i in 'mine' or 'sight' today. 1530 is during the transition from Middle to Modern English, and the Great Vowel Shift, where the pronunciation of the vowels shifted, was going on as well. As rastajenk noted, it would be 'sitting' today.
I like "Snoweth".
"Let it snoweth, let it snoweth"
Or the weather outside is yvell
But the fire is so delightvell
And since there no place to goeth
Let it snoweth, let it snoweth,
Let it snoweth.
Lucien said...
"Too many interesting past tense forms are falling into desuetude: sneaked rather than snuck, lighted, not lit, slayed, not slew. I like the old forms."
Old and Middle English used to have 4 different verb classes, and the two largest classes - weak and strong - had different was to conjugate the subclasses. Here's a Wiki article: Middle English verbs.
In the move to modern English, all of those classes collapsed into a few basic forms.
- Most moved to the -ed form: work/worked/worked.
- A few kept their vowel-changing form - sink/sank/sunk - but there were more of this type in Old/Middle English.
- Irregular verbs.
"Shown" as a past participle is the relict of one of the older verb classes that is disappearing. The English language is still moving towards standardizing its verbs into the -ed conjugation. And "Showed" as the past participle reflects that move.
"Still not much snow here... even though the city told its nonessential workers to stay home."
I got an email from my alder referring to "the blizzard". There was a time when blizzard was reserved for a real, life threatening event.
Austin gets its first freeze of the year Friday. Or maybe Fryeze, who knows. Mere frost is often enough to shut down the entire city. Almost as bad as Atlanta. Wish us luck!
Jamie:
As to the spoken word, I sure wish elocution were still a subject...
May not be a subject but it's still important. My show took place outdoors to a crowd of 1-2000. As the speech-giver (ringmaster) it was important that everyone understand it over ambient, crowd, echo noises and that it was in the round.
Show was 45 minutes long and I can recall a number of occasions when my tongue was tired afterward.
I wonder how current American English compares with (to?, stacks up against?) other languages with respect to flexibility, precision, clarity and regularity.
Basic spoken English is one of the easiest languages to learn due to its nearly complete lack of inflection.
It is devoid of gender declension, except for persons, pets, and (if you're untroubled by being thought a sexist by the purple-hair folx), nations and ships.
Case declension for nouns, adjectives, and articles has been entirely lost since Old English. Three of the original eight cases still exist in very simple form for pronouns: subject, object, and possessive, e.g. he/him/his.
Declension for number is dead easy for regular nouns-just add an "s" or "es" to pluralize-and is completely lost for adjectives and articles. Again, it still exists for pronouns (I/we, me/us, he/she/they), and there are a fair number of irregular plural forms that have to be memorized (e.g. mouse/mice, sheep/sheep.)
Verb conjugations for tense are relatively simple and regular. Even the irregular verbs are being overtaken by their regular forms, e.g. lit/lighted. Mood is mostly confined to indicative and imperative forms, which are practically identical to each other and to the infinitive. We still have a subjunctive mood ("If I were you") but it is usually absent from the speech of young or uneducated native English speakers and faces extinction in the next few generations. Active and passive voice are interchangeable except for the most pedantic or scholarly circumstances. There are no different conjugations for person and number for regular verbs, except to add an "s" or "es" to the third-person singular (I love/she loves.)
Our vocabulary is markedly larger than that of any other language, as we eagerly appropriate words from other languages, with no fussy "Royal Academy of English" enforcing language purity. This is both bad (more words to memorize, carrying subtly different connotations and nuances) and good (increased flexibility; increased likelihood that there is a cognate from a non-native speaker's own tongue.)
Where we do really fall down is on the orthography of written English. Thanks primarily to Caxton and the other printers of the Middle Ages, who often came from far-off shires where words were pronounced very differently than in London, the spelling of many English words does not correlate well with their modern pronunciation. The same is true in some other languages, notably French, but this problem is completely absent from Spanish and other languages where there is a body that enforces proper phonetic spelling, and of course does not exist in ideographic languages such as Chinese.
In 1939, the Warner Bros. animation studio, affectionately called Termite Terrace, produced a short called “Sioux Me” about an Indian village suffering from a drought. The village chief complains to the shaman, who declares a rain dance ceremony. In addition to the dance itself the rainmakers perform a chant containing this refrain,
We don’t want no frost,
We don’t want no dew,
We don’t want no fog,
We don’t want no snew…er, snow!
As a fan of etymology, the changes always interested me. Initially, English spelling was all over the place with even letters having different sounds attributed to them (ff used for ss many times but still(presumed) pronounced 'ss').
I still use archaic spellings in my books because it lends an old-timey 'flavor' but overall the trend has been towards standardizing. All in all, I favor that standardization in common communications. Use the arcane spellings for flavor as I just did.
It's easy for this comment group to wax nostalgic about arcane spelling, you're intelligent and can already read. With schools as shitty as they are now, I dread what it would be like if there were nine spellings for words. The kids are damn near illiterate as it is.
Also love the old English forms. Just by its looks, "yvell" conveys the idea better than 'evil.' Haven't seen any modern usage of 'yclept' for 'named' but then I don't have easy access to the OED.
Tim Maguire suggested that it's about the same period between the present and Shakespeare, and the Shakespeare and Chaucer. However, that's a bit off.... Shakespeare died in 1617 and Chaucer in 1400. So the two of them are much closer to one another than to us. Might put in Austen to get a sequence with about two centuries between each author. Present-Austen-Shakespeare-Chaucer.
Austen is perfectly understandable, but sounds formal (and probably was intended to).
Shakespeare is usually understandable but often difficult.
Chaucer is sometimes understandable but always difficult.
As a fan of etymology, the changes always interested me. Initially, English spelling was all over the place with even letters having different sounds attributed to them (ff used for ss many times but still(presumed) pronounced 'ss').
Although it looks like an 'F', that archaic letter is in fact a 'Long S', with no horizontal crossbar.
One benefit of spanish is that it sounds like it spells.
Very few words like: Through, Bough, or Enough
Oligonicella, meet the Long s. It could be confused for an “f”.
Another letter that fell by the wayside was the Thorn. A capital thorn sorta survives in a kitschy form Ye Olde. That Y (which often have two horizontal bars across the middle) is pronounced like TH.
Thorn should not be confused with the letter Eth, which represents the other way we pronounce TH in English.
Blame the Normans for this. After they conquered England, they replaced the old English alphabet, which had several letters that we do not today, with the Latin alphabet.
Hassayamper:
Although it looks like an 'F', that archaic letter is in fact a 'Long S', with no horizontal crossbar.
This original displays the confusion I mean. The "s" in both the title and the body are represented (but not always) by an a 'long s' very difficult to discern from an "f" as there is a crossbar, albeit abbreviated and on the left. The difficulty is easily seen in the smaller text. The long s was done away with with 'modern' type setting.
The image also displays widely variant spellings and capitalization, both of which became more stable later.
(Wiki)
The long s is often confused with the minuscule ⟨f⟩, sometimes even having an f-like nub at its middle but on the left side only in various Roman typefaces and in blackletter. There was no nub in its italic type form, which gave the stroke a descender that curled to the left and which is not possible without kerning in the other type forms mentioned.
Post a Comment