[Civsoc-mw] A LITTLE on ETYMOLOGY and SPELLING

[Tony Thontholani]

A LITTLE on ETYMOLOGY and SPELLING

[This is the kind of thing I talk about in the seminars]

In the 1500s, after English had ousted French as the language of literature and governance in England, the scribes and scholars began to deliberately change the language.

English writers now begin to pull their Latin words directly from ancient Roman secular writers rather than Medieval Church Latin or French. And the writers and scholars look at the older words in the language which came up through vernacular French from Vulgar Latin, and they recognize the slop and scars.

Here, in the 1500s and after, knowledge of etymology becomes a source of English spelling. And the writers in the language begin to rinse the French from their words.
 
Chaucer's pilgrims came together by chance, or as he put it, "by aventure." By the 1500s this word has become "adventure" through awareness of Latin, that it is a compound in ad. And so Middle English "amonish" becomes "admonish." "Aminister" "administer." "Avance" changes to "advance."

The restored forms then changed the pronunciations.

But sometimes they don't, and they leave a spelling dissonance, as in "indict," which before 1600 or so used to be spelled "endite" and still is pronounced that way.

They restored -d- in "adjudge" and the -b- in "debt," "doubt," "subtle," though none is pronounced. "Victuals" was respelled along the Latin model in the 1500s, but it is still vulgarly "vittles."

The restored classical –h- has changed the pronunciation of "authentic," "horizon," "Hebrew," "hypocrisy," "hectic," and homily." But in "stomach," "asthma," "school," "chronicle," "chameleon," "character," "rhyme," and "rhythm" it has not. 

The -l- was restored (and generally sounded) in "fault," "vault," "assault," "culpable," and "cauldron." The -g- came back in "impregnable" and "cognizance." The -p- in "corpse." The -n- was restored in "convent" (its doublet, "coven," hasn't changed, probably because it had taken on a specialized, non-classical sense).

Sometimes the effort to be classically correct went too far.

"Admiral" had been "amiral," which was right, the word was from Arabic and is the same as "emir." But presumed Latin added an excrescent -d- to it. As the pronunciation followed the change, the etymological error did not create a spelling trap.

It does, however, in "scythe," an Old English word, which was falsely derived from Latin "scindere" "to cut," and so a -c- was added. A faulty etymology of a Germanic word as a Latin one also put the -s- in "island," presuming it was based on "isle." Even worse, the mistake contaminated the unrelated word "aisle" (of a church); it comes from a Latin word for "wing," but by the late Middle Ages it had become confused with the "isle" that means “island,” and it partook of the excrescent -s-.

Sometimes they just bungled it: "Anthem" was Middle English "anteme;" the -h- is an attempt at Greek, but the Greek word was "antiphona." "Comptroller" is a bungled etymologizing of "controller" as though it came from Latin "computare" (the verb behind "computer"). "Author" and "authority" acquired the -h- by confusion with "authentic," but "author" and "authority" are from Latin, not Greek, and they never had a -th-.

Not all of it has stuck: "Conceit," "deceit," and "receipt" all are from Latin "capere;" the -p- sometimes was restored in all of them, but it has stuck only in the last.

[Source: Harper]