"sucrye of strabyrs", 1683

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, in and around the greater Boston area - you may not notice this,
because you're hyperaccustomed - to coin a word - to it, *many* people
pronounce _-berry -bury_ as unstressed [bri]. Hence, reading
_strabyrs_ as an attempt by a semi-literate woman to write
['strO,briz] or some such seems to me a reasonable WAG. I'd also buy
_sucrye_ as an attempt at a pronunciation-spelling of a
spelling-pronunciation [sukri/Sukri], though I have no reason to
believe that any such pronunciation ever existed. WTF, this is just
another WAG. But...

Youneverknow.
--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain


On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> I have the following sentence in a letter from a
> wife to her husband about to sail out of Marblehead, Mass., in 1683:
>
> "I sent you a bucket of the bust sucrye of
> strabyrs ... I beg your exceptance of my love thear in.”
>
> "Strabyrs" seems obviously
> "strawberries" Â "Sucrye" is surely related
> somehow to "sucre", but that word is not in the OED with the meaning "sugar".
>
> I would be interested in the opinions of the
> distinguished members of this list about the following hypothesis:
>
> 1) Â  Being a transcription from handwriting of
> 1683, there may be inaccuracies due to fading,
> interpretation, and omission of abbreviation marks.
>
> 2) Â  There is in the MS an abbreviation mark
> associated with both the R of "sucrye" and the B of "strabyrs" that means -ER.
>
> 3) Â  The Y in "sucrye" was written instead of I for the long E sound.
>
> 4) Â  The YR in "strabyrs" was reversed from RY,
> whether by a slip of the pen or some other error.
>
> 5) Â  This Y was written instead of IE for the long E sound.
>
> 6) Â  The semi-silent W in "strawberries" was omitted.
>
> Thus the following derivations:
>
> sucrye <-- sucr[er][i]e <-- sucrerie
> strabyrs <-- strab[er][ry]s  <-- stra[w]berr[i]s  <-- strawberries
>
> ("Sucrerie" perhaps does not appear in English
> either. Â I do not read French, but: Â Although
> "sucrerie" (Fr.) has a different meaning today, a
> correspondent translates it as "sweet" and cites a 17th-century dictionary:
>
>>Maybe "sucrerie of strawberries" (sweet of strawberry, strawberry sweet)
>>
>>Dictionnaire de Richelet (1680) :
>>"Sucreries : toutes choses sucrées. Patisserie
>>composée de sucre et choses douces."
>
> All ayes and nays accepted.
> Joel
>

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