Comments on: Sunday Funnies: LOL March 14

By: John Small Berries

John Small Berries — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:39:16 +0000

Probably, mitch4. Sir Thomas Smith, John Hart and William Bullokar were the three most important spelling reformers of the 16th century. Smith’s book was written in Latin, so it’s a little less accessible these days now that Latin has fallen out of fashion; and Bullokar took great pains to try and preserve as much of the existing orthography as possible (so that future generations could still read the writing of the past). Hart is my favorite, since his orthography was far less ambiguous than Bullokar’s… and my Latin is atrocious.

By: mitch4

mitch4 — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:26:25 +0000

John, was this Hart one of the characters in the historical section of “The Sound Pattern of English”? I remember being floored by the idea that the underlying representations were being related to these outdated orthographic practices. But we didn’t really work through that whole section.

By: Mark in Boston

Mark in Boston — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:50:07 +0000

W. S. Gilbert loved to force rhymes. For instance “or perhaps Eye - tal - eye - ann” (Italian) to rhyme with “He remains an Englishman.”

By: John Small Berries

John Small Berries — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:19:34 +0000

Hmph, it stripped out the superscripts. I knew I should have gone with asterisk/dagger instead.

By: John Small Berries

John Small Berries — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:18:51 +0000

WARNING: linguistic geekery ahead. You have been warned.

mitch4: If you were reciting Blake’s “The Tyger” would you force-rhyme “hand or eye” and “symmetry”?

Well, Blake flourished after the Great Vowel Shift had completed, so the pronunciation should have been pretty similar to modern. It’s very possible, though, that he was emulating a rhyme from an earlier period - in the sixteenth century, “eye” and “symmetry” did rhyme, though neither was pronounced in the same way that they are today.

As I mentioned above, there was a handful of authors in the latter half of the sixteenth century who attempted (in vain, obviously) to reform English spelling to comport with its pronunciation; while their attempts failed, their treatises provide us with an invaluable insight into how the language was pronounced at the time. Of these authors, John Hart1, in his An Orthographie (1569), came closest to the idea of the IPA - each of the letters in his reformed orthography stood for one sound alone2; and individual phonemes represented in normal English by digraphs (th, ch, voiced th, etc.) were given invented symbols to adhere to his one letter-one sound rule.

Anyway, Hart fairly consistently renders a final y as “ei”, a diphthong of “eh” and “ee” sounds (probably /eɪ/ in IPA, or thereabouts); and both “eye” and the pronoun “I” were rendered that way too (whereas today, they’re a diphthong of “ah” and “ee”, or /ɑɪ/ in IPA).
_____
1. Relationship to B.C. cartoonist Johnny Hart currently unknown.
2. He was somewhat less than consistent when it came to unstressed vowels (ə), however.

By: Pirk

Pirk — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:41:14 +0000

@11 detcord -

I was at work and clicked your link to have my computer say “your anus” just as my boss walked by

By: Rammy M

Rammy M — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:25:52 +0000

@19 & @21
In similar case I sometimes use “hr”

There are, of course, many “solutions”, including tables and “the reader can figure it out well enough”

By: Keera

Keera — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:03:27 +0000

John #24, thanks! The things I learn here.

By: mitch4

mitch4 — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:35:36 +0000

If you were reciting Blake’s “The Tyger” would you force-rhyme “hand or eye” and “symmetry”? If so, on which sound? I tend to stick to modern pronunciation and thus not quite rhyme; but I imagine a case could be made for an -ee sound …

By: John Small Berries

John Small Berries — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 01:13:21 +0000

Keera: Roman grammarians did write upon the correct pronunciation of the Latin tongue (which became important as the Empire spread, to keep the spoken language understandable from Rome to the far reaches). While their personal interpretations were sometimes contradictory, and not set forth in anything as elegant or well-defined as the International Phonetic Alphabet, we do have a “best guess” interpretation of classical Latin pronunciation (which differs in a number of respects from modern liturgical pronunciation).

(A handful of sixteenth-century English linguists did the same, so we have a pretty good idea of how Shakespeare’s plays should be performed - lo and behold, his rhymed couplets did actually rhyme, which is often not the case when performed with modern pronunciation…)