[Ads-l] Offlist: Re: [ADS-L] "old boy" = the devil

[Joel Berson]

      From: Robin Hamilton <robin.hamilton3 at VIRGINMEDIA.COM>
 To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU 
 Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 6:12 PM
 Subject: Re: [ADS-L] "old boy" = the devil
   
re "sate" -- perhaps should be interpreted "was seated", and pronounced to rhyme
with "fate".

JB: I still think "sate" is "sat" with the "customary" appended "e".  See "She bide ["bid"] me hold my tonge" slightly earlier.

"y" -- clearly representing "th" for thorn, as Joel expands -- but how was it
written in the original  MS (which I guiltily confess I haven't got round to
looking at yet)?  Were seventeenth century New Englanders already into Ye Olde
English Tea Shoppe?

JB:  No.  :-)  But see below; they might have appended final "e"s.  I don't think, however, New Englanders would have used the term "old England'; more likely would have been "old home".  :-)


"bedshed" = "bed's head" = "head of the bed".

JB:  May be,  but "bedshead", as one word rather than two.


Having looked at the MS scrap (finally), the scribe uses "y" [sic] to represent
the (both voiced and voiceless, but only ever at the beginning of a word?) "th"
sound.

JB:  At this time the form of "y" used for "th" ("the" in ms) and for "y" ("years" in the ms) was the same.  It was customary to raise the "e" in the "ye" for "the" in mss and printed documents. Faithful modern transcriptions of such documents also raise the "e".  I don't know whether one finds "ye" for "the" without a raised "e" in printed 17th-century documents (someone perhaps knows, or could look), but in some (less faithful) modern transcriptions it is not raised.  I'm sure the form of the "y" in the middle of words was the same; y would it be different?  I don't recall ever seeing a yogh in printed or ms, but I have read only very little in ms form.

JSB

___________________

Question for paleographers/ historians of printing:  

Earlier THORN and WYNN (for "th", and in the written or printed text, a
positional rather than a phonological variant) and YOGH (for both "y" and "g")
caused problems for printers from the get go.  English printers [Scottish
printers developed different solutions] simply disambiguated YOGH as either "g"
or "y", and (for a period, I'm not quite sure how long) represented an original
THORN as "y[superscript]e".

This obviously shows up most clearly [can't think of anywhere to point to
off-hand, sorry] when printing a manuscript written pre-1400 (roughly) in the
period post-1600 (maybee) -- thus problems with the text of La3amond's [3=YOGH]
_Brut_ that Joel adduced earlier.

Anyway, the use of the glyph "y" in a late seventeenth century MS caught my eye,
and I'm hoping someone on the list may be able to fill in the details around
this.  

HEALTH WARNING:  I'm well outside my zone in the comments above, so I may have
screwed up quite considerably in the account I give.  I'll be more than happy to
stand corrected.  I'm not sure my remarks are good enough even for government
work ...

Robin Hamilton


   

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org