minow (08/01/82)
In a very long article on the English Language in the 11th edition of the Enclycopaedia Britannica, the authors note: ... for the sounds of 'th', especially the sound in 'that' the Old English "thorn" [still used in Icelandic] continued to be used. But as these characters were not used for French and Latin, their use even in English became disturbed towards the 15th century, and when printing was introduced, the founts, cast for continental languages, had no characters for them, so that they were dropped entirely, being replaced, '3' [see below] by 'gh', 'yh', 'y', and /th/ [thorn] by 'th'. This was a real loss to the English alphabet. In the north it is curious to that the printers tried to express the *forms* rather than the powers of these letters, and consequently '3' was represented by 'z', the black letter form of which was confounded with it, while the /th/ was expressed by 'y', which its MS. form had come to approach or come cases simulate. So in early Scotch books we find 'zellow', 'ze', 'yat', 'yem' = 'yellow', 'ye', 'that', 'them'. The 'thorn' is a Runic character used for the /th/ sound and can be traced back to the earliest (8th century?) inscriptions on the Ruthwell and Bewcastle crosses. The character I have represented by '3' is used in the IPA phonemic alphabet to represent the /zh/ /zh/ sound in 'measure'. This note has gone on long enough that another comment on 'ov' will not noticably increment the level of boredom. Again, from the E.B. article on English: As to the actual proportion of the various elements of the language, it is probable that original English words do not now form more than a fourth or perhaps a fifth of the total entries in a full English dictionary... But,... only a small portion [of the words] are used by any one individual.... This portion includes the great majority of the Anglo-Saxon words and but a minority of the others. The latter are, in fact, almost all names -- the vast majority names of things (nouns), a smaller number names of attributes and actions (adjectives and verbs).... [Even if the proportion of foreign words increases to 40% in technical works] it is not the question of whence words may have been taken, but how they are used in a language that settles its character. If new words when adopted conform themselves to the manner and usage of the adopting language, it makes absolutely no difference whether they are taken over from some other langugage, or invented off at the ground. In either case they are new words to begin with; in either case also, if they are needed, they will become as thoroughly native, i.e., familiar from childhood to those who use them, as those that posess the longest native pedigree. Which is to say that 'ov' will be assimilated only if it is needed. Regards. Martin Minow decvax!minow