Dear Anglo-Saxon Fuþorc: WÞF?

[lwood]

I mean, seriously. Four ways to state "A"? WTF--no, wait, let's be precise: WÞF? You took a perfectly reasonable ansuz out back, turned it into an o so you could have your wicked, wicked way with the rune formerly known as o but now transmogrified into the oe-ligature, but wait, once you were done waterboarding o until it confessed itself an oe, so you could move a to o and call it a night...

Only then did it hit you that maybe you missed "A". Why was this?

I hear I can blame the Celts for this, turning up and wanting to spell their words and what-all. Durned Celts. Unless it wasn't them, and whether it was them or not you can still pass the whiskey.

*eyes erynn999

Then, of course, sadistic thus-and-so that you are, you had to find abnormal a's lurking around the back of the mead hall, quite possibly the result of that whiskey, but you know the barrel was full, the night was long, it was another country, and besides, the lass is dead.

That leaves a helluva mess, you know that?

Now we've got ós and oethel^* as remnants of your first high crime, then the rag-tag bunch of the rest of your misdemeanors: the just plain a of ac (HEY! It's the Bill the Cat rune!), and then the æ of æsc.

Then, you know, throw on a few centuries of sloppy pronunciation, and now I'm left, in my poor little slideshow, explaining how oe is like oi, except that it's less like punk and more like how one starts the French word for "egg", and that æ is exactly between "a" and "e", unless it's really like an extremely exhausted epsilon swum all the way from Greece (alas, Hellas!) and boy are its flippers tired.

Then there are the G's and K's. Do Not Get Me Started--I'm still not sure I can tell a velar k from a palatalized one.

-- Lorrie

^* -- oethel properly starts with an oe-ligature. Nobody wants my lecture on how it's nigh-impossible to display this properly on the arbitrarily chosen computer. This footnote is to let that oe-ligature know that I've got my eye on it, tricksy thing...it is on notice, oh yes.

Comments

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Ain't language fun?

I've been wanting an etymologocal temporal map of Europe (showing which languages came from where and when they went to other places and bred with the locals), but I think I ought to start with a phonetic one. And one for written forms (when did we get thorn and edh, and when did we drop them in favour of th, and why? Where did our current 's' come from, and why does German esset look like a Greek beta? usw.).

[weofodthignen]

ß looks as it does because there are 2 ways to write "s" in old German handwriting (by old, I mean it goes with Fraktur printing and was taught through the Third Reich and possibly afterwards): a loop used in final position and a very angular hook or inverted "V" (this is a very angular style overall). The hook followed immediately by the loop--"ss"--made the ß in the same way as Latin et written in certain copperplate styles made &. So the resemblance to a beta is accidental--and pre-4-number codes, I used to use B.

þ started off as a rune (linguists derive it from the Greek delta) and was sensibly incorporated into texts in the Latin alphabet for the sounds we represent with "th." ð is a variant on it that apparently developed in Anglo-Saxon (where the 2 symbols are used almost indiscriminately) and Icelandic has gone to and fro on its use vs. þ. (For reasons best understood by an Icelander, this is explained under "D" in Cleasby-Vigfusson: http://web.ff.cuni.cz/cgi-bin/uaa_slovnik/gmc_search_v3?cmd=viewthis&id=cv:b0093:5 is the relevant paragraph (wrongly treated as a whole entry in the online version). I imagine English dropped them in the 15th century with the adoption of printing, at the same time as the runic "w," for the same reason: not present in Latin. The non-Latin letter that hung on longest was the open-topped "g," "yogh," which represented different sounds other than the Latin hard "g." Perhaps fortunately, I don't have the books with me here at work to say more '-) But "sh" had always been represented by 2 letters in Anglo-Saxon, only they used "sc," so the digraph for the "th" sounds was a familiar kind of spelling strategy.

Frith,
M

[keristor.livejournal.com]

Very interesting, so the ss character is relatively new (I regard anything after printing became common as 'modern', because printing tended to stabilise and codify practices). I gather that it is now decreasing in popularity in German, in favour of writing 'ss' again.

"I don't have the books with me here at work to say more"

I don't have the books at all, which is my point, what I want is a unified chronology of writing and language, with maps showing the evolution and the social groups (for instance, people say "Anglo-Saxon" but where were the Angles and Saxons at that time and how did they move and take their language with them?). And really I want it animated, with zoom and search so I can follow the bits of language. Don't ask for much, do I? *g*

[temve.livejournal.com]

I gather that it is now decreasing in popularity in German, in favour of writing 'ss' again.

Yes and no - the recent orthography reform hasn't done away with it entirely but has cleared up some confusing and contradictory rules about when to use 'ß' and when to use 'ss'. Now it's finally logical (yay!) - 'ss' after short vowels and 'ß' after long vowels and diphthongs.

Unless of course you're Swiss - they disavowed the 'ß' ages ago and plain don't use it. :)

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Heh--worse, some of the more recent scholarship brings into quesiton the whole idea of a Migration Age--it might have been more like the Memetic Migration Age, where languages and other culture-markers spread, but large populations didn't shift.

The past just isn't what it used to be...

-- Lorrie

[weofodthignen]

There was some magical/mystical stuff being encoded in the extension of the fuþorc, but the changes in the vowels mostly reflect the fact it was being used as an alphabet--the name-words were pronounced differently, so the sound the letter stood for was a different one.

The status of œ in A-S is dubious. I'm told via woo-woo that the "eo" in Eostre's name is actually a dialectal "ö" sound, which one would expect to be written "œ," but that digraph basically appears on the model of Latin (where it is indeed pronounced "oi") and there is no record of an "ö" sound in Anglo-Saxon that I am aware of. Although yes, that would have been a transitional form on the way from "oþala," the recorded spellings have "e" (usually long, spelled "é") or in a few cases long or short "æ." English was already developing a distinction between higher and lower "e" sounds, similar to the distinction between "æ" and "a," and to my mind it's artificial historicizing to say the Ethel rune represents "œ," let alone long "œ." However, that is indeed what Bosworth-Toller says . . . entry here for that and the spellings, but I see I need to proofread it for a few typos: http://web.ff.cuni.cz/cgi-bin/uaa_slovnik/gmc_search_v3?cmd=viewthis&id=bt:b0260:10

"æ" should be easy for an American! It's short "a"; you guys also have the soft "a" that is "a" in Anglo-Saxon spelling, only it's how you pronounce short "o." Things are more complicated with the various British dialects, many of which have only retained one of the sounds.

Frith,
M

PS: Since this machine I use at work is a laptop, with no numberpad, and I hate those ampersand gobbledygook things that real nerds use, I cut and paste from a cheatsheet that I mailed to myself in Word.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

There was some magical/mystical stuff being encoded in the extension of the fuþorc, but the changes in the vowels mostly reflect the fact it was being used as an alphabet--the name-words were pronounced differently, so the sound the letter stood for was a different one.

That's the sort of thing that I can easily expect, but, after being made summat gun-shy by some authors' thoughts on lost secrets of the $tribe rune magicians, I am now quite careful around any such claims.

"æ" should be easy for an American!

I pointed out to dpaxson just yesterday that, overall, US English has had less dialectualization (and arguably less shift among its accents) than UK English--it's a funny old thing, language. Still, for this slideshow, we're trying to do our best to hash out how it ought to be, knowing going in that it's futile.

The best exampls of that was calc vs. cen, where countgeiger and I were saying "cook" and "key" over and over, trying to work out what made a palatalized "k" sound different from a velarized one. He failed--I could feel where they were different in my mouth, but doubt I could tell the difference by ear (and my ears don't suck).

Whee!

PS: Since this machine I use at work is a laptop, with no numberpad, and I hate those ampersand gobbledygook things that real nerds use, I cut and paste from a cheatsheet that I mailed to myself in Word.

I have a long, LONG history of having any other method but HTML elements ("ampersand gobbledygook") being refused by one browser or another, with often humorous results. Shoot, I run into character encoding problems every time we have to get Idunna to press--eths and thorns are the best candidates to clog the works when someone writing on a PC e-mails to us on our trusty Macs...

So, at all times, I have to keep an eye out on what's most interoperable. PDF, as it embeds the fonts, is excellent for this, but in HTML, I'm stuck with the elements. Blah!

-- Lorrie

[digitalsidhe.livejournal.com]

To produce an oe ligature, at least in HTML, what's wrong with œ? I use it in Phœnix all the time, and haven't heard any complaints from folks on other platforms. It's even sanctioned by the W3C!

Anyway, if you want to deliver a lecture on typography, I'll be happy to listen. Because I'm just that kind of nrrd [sic, by analogy with "grrl"].

[lwood.livejournal.com]

œ isn't in ISO-8859-!(5), so its acceptance is going to be hit-and-miss. I'm delighted to hear it got W3C blessing, though, as aforetime it didn't have it: IE would render it properly, Macs failed.

Short form of that rant...

Old Norse's most common transliteration, pre-computers, used o-ogonek (an ogonek is like a cedilla, just facing the other way 'round). The ISO, when putting together 8859-1, had already given obscure little Iceland rather a lot when they got ð and þ into the character set: there was no room for o-ogonek.

Iceland switched to ö, which is how that sound is written in other Scandinavian languages (unless it's ø, as it is in the Faroe Islands).

Scandinavian Studies scholars--being scholars--either got with that program (which was a boon for Your Humble Webmonkey), or got fonts that jolly well had o-ogonek, which, not being in the standard, could be any damn place in the font table that the designer thought good.

The first edition of Our Troth was available for free online until the revised edition came out. When I first started as the Troth's webmistress, my first task was to gather all our intellectual property into space on our very own domain, and that was, and is, our crown jewel.

Kveldulf Gundarsson, primary author and editor of the foregoing, loved him his o-ogonek--on his PC, on his original manuscript.

These files had gone through at least one, probably two, sets of hands before finding me. The first attempt to HTML-ize it had been to simply run the whole thing through MS Word's "Save as HTML" feature. I don't know what else went on (and don't want to, yonks).

The o-ogoneks were stripped by the time I saw it--not replaced with wtf or even spaces, just...dropped to the floor. This is important, the Icelanders (and Old Norse) were damned fond of "that sound we now spell as ö". The first bloody poem in the bloody Elder Edda, their answer to the Bible's Book of Genesis, is Vöuspá.

(next comment)

[lwood.livejournal.com]

OH! AND! To add insult to injury? While I was actually doing the work in vi on Linux, one of the platforms we were keenest on was MacOS 9, as dpaxson is a staunch Mac advocate.

The crap I got of course had hardcoded eths, thorns, and accented everything, rendered very poorly from code page 851 to ISO-8859-1. Ð, þ, and ý are all in different places between those, and MacRoman doesn't support them at all.

This was when I learned about HTML elements--so that a browser might make its most gallant attempt to render a character properly if at all possible.

Unless it was working in MacRoman as its character set, of course--then it failed. However, that was something I couldn't overcome without becoming untrue to my source material, and that of course I would not do.

So, HTML elements to make it work anywhere it could, all o-ogonek to o-umlaut for great justice, and for dpaxson, I looked at the cobbled-together solutions that scholars had tried to hash out...and then found the best pre-OS X answer, which was to dig up the official Apple Icelandic fonts and keymap and install them.

The number of Mac people who could read that damned thing was probably fewer than a dozen (not counting Icelanders) but it was the closest I could come with what I had at the time.

Thank the gods for the fact that later browsers got on board with ISO-8859-1 (and 15, now with tasty Euro!) across the board. Unicode is a grand idea (I mean, it has Sindarin and Quenya, what's not to like?), but doesn't have widespread acceptance.

On the bright side, things are getting better--I don't believe Tiger had support for the yogh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh) unless one downloaded Junicode, but Leopard, at least in Helvetica Neue, does.

-- Lorrie

[faeryl.livejournal.com]

And if the alphabet isn't enough to make one pause, have you noticed how MANY frickin' ways there are in Anglo Saxon to say "the" "an" or "a"(the word, not the letter)?

GAH! :-) 'Twas my downfall when I attempted to learn the language.

[lwood.livejournal.com]

Heh--(in)definite articles are one of the oldest, squirreliest bits in almost any language. However, the Romans did manage to get this to be the more-or-less the same across the Romantic languages by the time they were through.

Not even the Romans, however, could completely steamroll "to be"...

-- Lorrie

[quirkwidget.livejournal.com]

.... just.... giggling... quietly in my corner...

:D

[lwood.livejournal.com]

*grin* Really, a chucklemaking rant was my whole point, there.

-- Lorrie