Re: History of French

From: Neeraj Mathur (neeraj.mathur_at_chch.ox.ac.uk)
Date: 09/20/04 

Date: Mon, 20 Sep 2004 11:16:22 +0100

"Jacques Guy" <jguy@alphalink.com.au> wrote in message
news:414F9A95.1314@alphalink.com.au...
> Richard Herring wrote:>>
>> In message <ub4mk0lg6nsvq5rk3h2li1k9otqjq5kubi@4ax.com>, Mxsmanic
>> <mxsmanic@hotmail.com> writes
>
>> >The spelling shows that. Nobody deliberately spells a word in a way
>> >that conflicts dramatically with pronunciation the first time it is
>> >transcribed.
>
>> Island. Debt. Ptarmigan.
>
> The key word is "delibetately". If you were allowed to spell
> English as you figger (:-) she's spelt, you wouldn't
> deliberately write "island", "debt", "ptarmigan" but,
> instead, "iland", "det", "tarmigan".

Is there not a clas of words in English (and French) whose spellings were
reformed in the Renaissance, in order to reflect the Latinity of the new
elite? I know that that sentence would imply standardised spellings before
the Renaissance (which I know didn't really exist), but can we not base the
argument on 'consensus spellings' if you see what I mean?

Example: my Old French texts (late 12th and early 13th century works,
Francien dialect usually) seem to write 'set' consistently (what is the
manuscript tradition that this editorial spelling is based on, anybody? -
this is equivalent to the objection above) and the spelling 'sept' was the
result of an effort to restore Latinity.

In the same way, certain new coinages in English, when they borrow from
Greek or Latin sources, preserve approximations to Greek and Latin spelling
but which do not show up in English. An example would be any word like
'pneumatic' (from Greek pneuma, where the 'pn' sequence was pronounced as
such, unlike English). Such words are then 'deliberately misspelt' froman
English perspective. Or would your argument then simply reach back further,
to the source language?

Neeraj Mathur

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