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nRemember the recipe for a cockatrice the other day?
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nWhat’sngoing on with the funny ‘p’ shaped letters in that? Well, Old English had additionalnletters, drawn from the old Runic script. For example:-
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nǷ ƿ – called wynnnwas used to represent the /w/ sound in Old English
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nÐ ð – called ethnis a voiced dental fricative – /th/ asnin ‘thick’
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nÞ þ – called thornnis a voiceless dental fricative – /th/nas in ‘them’
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nBoth wynn and ethnwere dropped from English from about 1300 onward but thorn remained innuse into the Early Modern period. It was frequently used by early printers withna superscript letter /e/ to represent the word ‘the’; þe was often used to save space, and the fuller ‘the’nused where space was not a problem. Similarly þt was a commonnabbreviation for ‘that’. Over time, the thorn became confusednwith the letter /y/, giving words like ye, you, yem, or yat whichnwould be pronounced as the, thou, them and that. Furthernconfusion arose with the old second person singular ye – meaning ‘you’,nand people began to pronounce þe (‘the’) as ‘ye’. We find this stillnin such formations as Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, with the first word pronouncedn‘ye’ rather than ‘the’. So pronounce it properly, as ‘The Old Tea Shop’.nAnd forget all that old-ee shop-ee nonsense too. Old English may have scatterednvowels around like there was no tomorrow, but that was then and this is now. Sonpack it in please.
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nJust as an example, take the word ‘pease’, as inn‘pease-pudding’. ‘Pease’ is a singular word, but when the /e/ was dropped fromnthe end, it became ‘peas’, which some bright spark assumed it must be pluralnbecause it had an ‘s’ at the end, so obviously the singular must be ‘pea’. Wencan see that ‘pease’ was singular from this line from October innSpenser’s Shepherd Calendar,
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n‘The vaunting poets found nought worth anpease.”n
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nThe plural form ‘peasen’ is seen in Chaucer’s Legende of thenGoode Women,
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n“He poureth pesen upon the nhacches slidre.”n
n(One poured peas on the hatches to make themnslippery).n
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nLangland’s Vision of Piers Plowman also has pees asnsingular and presen or peses as plural.
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| Edmund Spencer – A Shepherd’s Calendar – 1579 |
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nAnother combination ofnletters than has caused confusion in the past is the ampersand. The letter ‘e’nand ‘t’ of the Latin word ‘et’ – ‘and’ – were joined together tonmake the ligature ‘&’. One version of the name for this was that, becausenthe symbol looks like a sitting cat with a paw raised, it is called an ‘and-pussy-and’.nIn old elementary school-rooms, as the alphabet was recited, any letter thatncould stand as a word alone was prefixed with the words ‘per se’ – Latinnfor ‘in, of, or by itself’. The letter ‘A’, standing at the head of thenalphabet, with its prefix, ‘A-per-se’, came to mean anything excellent, as innthe line describing Melusine from ‘The Romans of Partenay’,
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n“She wasna woman A-per-se, alone.”n
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nAt the other end of the alphabet are the lettersn‘X Y Z and &’, which would be said as ‘Ecks, Wye Zed and per se and’,nwhich, schoolboys being schoolboys, was simplified to ‘am-puzzy-am’ or ‘and-pussy-and’,nuntil later, having learned some Latin, they recognised to be ‘and per senand’, which eventually became ‘ampersand’.
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| From Notes and Queries – December 30th 1871 |
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nIn a modern twist, it hasnbeen proposed, using the same logic, that @ should be called an ‘ampersat’ –n‘and per se @’ or ‘and by itself at’. I like it.
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