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(1) Henry Hitchings, How Letters Got Their Orders. Early printers put the h in ghost and ghastly. The lexicographer Noah Webster tried to get Americans to adopt tung and fether, to no avail. Wall Street Journal, Aug 13, 2013
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 65640017305404.html
(book review on David Crystal, Spell It Out. The curious, enthralling and extraordinary story of English spelling. St Martin's, 2013)
Note:
(a) The northern Irish surname Crystal is "reduced [by dropping Mac] Anglicized form of Mac Criostal (see McCrystal). [Criostal, a variant of Criostar, Gaelic form of Christopher]."
(b) Noah Webster and America's First Dictionary; About Us. Merriam-Webster Dctionary, undated
merriam-webster.com/info/noah.htm
("In 1806 Webster published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, the first truly American dictionary. * * * He was the first to document distinctively American vocabulary such as skunk, hickory, and chowder. Reasoning that many spelling conventions were artificial and needlessly confusing, he urged altering many words: musick to music, centre to center, and plough to plow, for example. (Other attempts at reform met with less acceptance, however, such as his support for modifying tongue to tung and women to wimmen—the latter of which he argued was 'the old and true spelling' and the one that most accurately indicated its pronunciation.)")
(i) skunk
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk
(section 1 Etymology)
(ii) hickory
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickory
(the genus Carya (Ancient Greek for "nut"); The genus includes 17–19 species of deciduous trees with pinnately compound leaves and big nuts [which are native to [I] China, Indochina, and India (State of Assam), [II] United States, [III] Canada and [IV] Mexico [each with their own species])
Before reading the Wiki page, I though China--but not Taiwan--must have hickory, which is called 山胡桃 there.
(iii) chowder
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chowder
(The origin of the term chowder is obscure)
(c) etymology (all are from www.merriam-webster.com):
* music: Middle English musik, from Anglo-French musike, from Latinmusica, from Greek mousikē any art presided over by the Muses, especially music, from feminine of mousikos of the Muses, from Mousa Muse
* center: Middle English centre, from Middle French, from Latin centrum, from Greek kentron sharp point, center of a circle
* plow: Middle English, from Old English plōh hide of land; akin to Old High German pfluog plow
* tongue: Middle English tunge, from Old English; akin to Old High German zunga tongue, Latin lingua
* night: Middle English, from Old English niht; akin to Old High German naht night, Latin noct-, nox, Greek nykt-, nyx
* ghost: Middle English gost, gast, from Old English gāst; akin to Old High German geist spirit, Sanskrit heḍa anger
* aghast: Middle English agast, from past participle of agasten to frighten, from a- (perfective prefix) + gasten to frighten
* debt: Middle English dette, debte, from Anglo-French dettesomething owed, from Vulgar Latin *debita, from Latin, plural of debitum debt, from neuter of debitus, past participle of debēre to owe, from de- + habēre to have
* receipt: Middle English receite, from Anglo-French, from Medieval Latin recepta, probably from Latin, neuter plural ofreceptus, past participle of recipere to receive
* travel: Middle English travailen, travelen to torment, labor, strive, journey, from Anglo-French travailler (First Known Use 14th century)
* travail has the same etymology as travel.
* favor: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Latin, from favēre to be favorable
* ax: Middle English, from Old English æcs
I can not find how tunge became tongue, or why Mr Webster chose favor and ax over favour and axe, respectively.
(d) etymology (from Online Etymology Dictionary):
* woman (n): late Old English wimman (plural wimmen), literally "woman-man," alteration of wifman (plural wifmen), a compound of wif "woman" (see wife) + man "human being" (in Old English used in reference to both sexes; see man (n.))
etymonline.com/?term=woman
(e) “he [Crystal] begins with the English writing system that developed in the seventh century. Missionaries arrived in Britain and found people speaking various dialects of a Germanic language. Some of these people were literate, but their writing system—runes, like those used by the Dwarves in "The Hobbit"—had pagan associations. To dispel the vapors of magic and spread Christianity, the incomers felt compelled to establish a new medium for written communication: the Roman alphabet, with its 23 letters. Twenty-three? Yes, because there was no j or w, and there was no distinction between u and v.”
(i) Anglo-Saxon Christianity
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Christianity
(often told as one of conflict between the Celtic Christianity spread by the Irish mission [from north-west of England], and Roman Christianity [from south-east] brought across by Augustine of Canterbury [sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 595])
(ii) rune (n; Old Norse & Old English rūn mystery, runic character, writing):
“any of the characters [ie letters] of any of several alphabets used by the Germanic peoples from about the 3d to the 13th centuries”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rune
(with example)
(iii) runes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runes
(letters in a set of related alphabets known as runic alphabets, which were used to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialised purposes thereafter)
(iv) Latin alphabet
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alphabet
Quote:
“From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived and the Romans eventually adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters [in the 7th century BC; see table].
“After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters Y and Z (or readopted, in the latter case) to write Greek loanwords * * * Thus it was that during the classical Latin period [75 BC to the 3rd century AD, when it developed into Late Latin] the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters [as mentioned in the wSJ book review: “no j or w, and there was no distinction between u and v”]
(v) English alphabet
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet
(section 1 History: In the fifth century Anglo-Saxon settlers brought languages and runic alphabet; Christian missionaries brought Latin script from the seventh century; the two [alphabets] continued in parallel for some time; The letter wynn (Ƿ ƿ; a rune incorporated into English alphabet] disappeared from English around the 14th century when it was supplanted by uu, which ultimately developed into the modern w; The letters u [Wiki does not explain the origin] and j [from France], as distinct from v and i, were introduced in the 16th century)
(f) “For a scribe being paid by the inch, the more cumbrous forms had their attractions.”
cumbrous (adj): “CUMBERSOME”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cumbrous
(g) “No account of English spelling can overlook the influence of William Caxton, who introduced printing to England in 1476. The author shows that Caxton's pragmatic approach had some unintended effects. Caxton brought in experienced compositors from Bruges. They spoke Flemish, and their knowledge of English was less than perfect. They spelled English words in ways that felt right to them, resulting in an English that had a distinctly Flemish hue. This is why we find anh in ghost: In Flemish the word was gheest. The h spread to related words, such as aghast and ghastly. But in other cases the Flemish tinge didn't last: In Caxton's texts there is an h in goat and goose.”
(i) William Caxton
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Caxton
(c 1415~1422 – c 1492; thought to be the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England
Quote: “travel to Cologne, in the course of which he [Caxton] observed the new printing industry, and was significantly influenced by German printing. He wasted no time in setting up a printing press in Bruges, in collaboration with a Fleming, Colard Mansion, and the first book to be printed in English was produced in 1473: Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a translation by Caxton himself. His translation had become popular in the Burgundian court and requests for copies of it were the stimulus for him to set up a press.[3] Bringing the knowledge back to England, he set up a press at Westminster in 1476 and the first book known to have been produced there was an edition of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
(ii) Bruges
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruges
(section 1 Origin of the name: “bridge”)
(h)
(i) “If you know that supercilium was the Latin for "eyebrow," you will spell supercilious with a c rather than an s at its heart.”
(A) supercilious (adj; Latin superciliosus, from supercilium eyebrow, haughtiness, from super- [over and above] + -cilium eyelid)
“coolly and patronizingly haughty”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/supercilious
(B) Compare
* cilium (n; Latin, eyelid; plural: cilia):
“1: a minute short hairlike process often forming part of a fringe; especially : one on a cell that is capable of lashing movement and serves especially in free unicellular organisms to produce locomotion or in higher forms a current of fluid 纖毛
2: EYELASH”
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cilium
* ciliary (adj)
(ii) “In the age of Shakespeare there was hostility to the letter z. The educationalist Richard Mulcaster thought that it looked alien and was ‘cumbersome to the hand in penning.’"
Richard Mulcaster
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mulcaster(c 1531-1611)
(iii) “In the 18th century, Samuel Johnson drew a distinction between travel and travail, two words that had been used interchangeably until then. * * * It is to a critic of Johnson, Noah Webster, that we owe the American preference for favor and ax—as opposed to the British favour and axe.”
Samuel Johnson
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson
(1709-1784; an English writer) |
发表于 8-15-2013 14:57:18
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