"wore black, or eat green" in 1657 Barbados

[Joel S. Berson]

At 9/12/2008 04:01 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>Might not this _eat_ have been pronounced "et" or be a misspelling of
>"et," given that AmE is pretty much the only dialect of E in which
>"eat, _et_" is non-standard?
>
>It would then match "wore" in tense.

I have assumed "eat" is the past tense and was
pronounced "et"; as the OED writes, "pa. tense
1-3 æt, (2 æat), 2-4 et(t, ..."  (I don't
remember how to decode the numbers into dates  --
I hope someone else will inform me.)  As for
misspelling, standardization of spelling began
about a century later, I think.  Just in the
excerpts I gave for "Sambo" Ligon writes
"refuseall" (only one instance in OED, from 1660).

Joel

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