Arthuriana -- all things King Arthur ! discussion
Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur
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Ye Olde Wordes
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'Wherefore Uthere waxed wonderly wroth' - I love that one.
I currently like maugre (despite/against)Well how cool is that? I never knew that. So I'm guessing that's where Rakoth Maugrim's name must have come from (in The Fionavar Tapestry). Neat!
Maugre is a Middle English word - Malory was writing during the early part of the evolution from Middle to Modern English which finished about 1550.
When I was in school (ages ago) the birth of Modern English was pinpointed at the works of Shakespeare and the King James translation of the Bible--approximately 1600. Many of us would struggle to read either as originally written.
Your schooling was defective on this point! There was something called The Great Vowel Shift that took about 100 years and ended approximately 1550. The outcome was Modern English. Malory was probably writing from about 1450 up to his death in 1470 - hence in the early part of the Great Vowel Shift.Reading Shakespeare or the King James Bible with the original spelling only presents extra difficulties because spelling had not been fixed; multiple spellings of most words were common.
Middle English still used the letter "thorn" and it's vocabulary and pronouciation are not modern in the least - no silent letters, for example. Reading those texts in original spelling without any prior knowledge is not possible now, though one might be able to get the gist (maybe).
I knew my schooling was defective! ;-)Chaucer wrote in Middle English, right? I can usually puzzle him out in the original. Of course, I know the "trick" about the thorn. (There was another Germanic consonant, whose identity escapes me at the moment.)
You're thinking of "eth", which derives from the Runic alphabet. I think it had mostly dropped out of use once Old English developed into Middle English but I'm not certain on that point.Yep - Chaucer died in 1400, well before the Great Vowel Shift started. There are dangers with Middle English words, though - many look the same as or similar to modern words but don't mean the same thing. An example would be "faith, hope and charity" where "charity" is nearer to modern "love" in meaning than to modern "charity". So without the assistance of glosses or a Middle English Dictionary it is easy to make mistakes.
Thorn is the p/b thing, right (th)? Is eth the gh thing that looks like a backwards 3?
That "charity" problem still existed in 1612, as that's what the phrase you quoted (from the King James Bible) meant. Coming from the Greek word "Charis" which meant "love", not what we think of as charity. Of course, all that is because languages are living, evolving things. Words have shifted in just the last century. It was just a little slower in the days before printing presses, not to mention telephones, television, computers, the Internet, and twitter--not to mention Goodreads. ;-)
It's the other "th" sound but was dropped in the transition from Old to Middle English.
At one time the English used the "y" to replace one of those, didn't they? Which is why "Ye Old Curiosity Shop" would be pronounce "the" and partly explains how the Latin "thou" transitioned to the English "you".
Correct - it was a corruption of thorn.
I currently like maugre (despite/against) and orgulest (most impressive), though I haven't tried to use them in conversation...yet.