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What’s with WH?

In many varieties of English, a W is a W. In these varieties, W sounds like [w] like in ‘wise’ and ‘wonderful’ and ‘wowza’ (unless it’s at the end like in ‘draw’ or ‘stow’, in which case it’s quiet as a mouse.)

However, in Scottish, Irish, New Zealand, and certain American dialects, wh-words are pronounced a little different. In words like ‘which’ and ‘whale’, the H makes the W kind of…H-y.

Why is that? Why are those words even spelled with an H to begin with? As with many questions about the bitter rivalry between English pronunciation and English spelling, we have to look to the distant past…

Or, you know, the fairly old past—the Old English-y one. Old English inherited from Indo-European (with a few twists and turns through Grimm’s Law) a sound we linguists like to call a voiceless labiovelar approximant1. In IPA, [ʍ]. That’s fancy language-people talk for a kind of voiceless W. In OE, this sound was spelled ‘hw’. ‘Which’ was ‘hwilc’ and ‘whale’ was ‘hwæl’. Perhaps the real poster child for this phenomenon is the first word of Beowulf: Hwæt! (ModE ‘what’)

During the Middle English period, the spelling of this sound was flipped to our modern ‘wh’, most likely due to the influence of French scribes who came to England with the Normans. It was also sometime during this period that some dialects began to see a merger between the pronunciation of ‘wh’ and plain old ‘w’. For a while, the merger was seen as uncouth, and educated speakers deliberately maintained the [ʍ] pronunciation of ‘wh’. Now, we find more dialects than not where the merger is complete and both spellings are pronounced [w]. But as mentioned before, there are several varieties of English where the original [ʍ] is hanging in there.

English has its share of strange, purely historic spellings, but this isn’t one of them. Your [ʍ] dropping friend isn’t mispronouncing ‘white’ or being pedantic; they’re just kicking it old school.

Notes

1This sound is sometimes traditionally/erroneously called a labiovelar fricative.

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Cool stuff about Writing Systems Today: Egyptian Hieroglyphs

or how I tried to teach myself hieroglyphs and failed hilariously

(Papyrus scroll, book of the dead, collection: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv. 10466)

Once upon a time when I was still wee and less annoying (<- lie) than today, I tried to teach myself how to read hieroglyphs, the ancient Egyptian writing system, because I was way into all things to do with Ancient Egypt.

Emphasis on ‘tried’. Here is how I screwed up:

1) I assumed each of those little pictures is either a word or a letter.
Well, good guess for a 12 year old, not completely wrong, but also not how hieroglyphs work.
Hieroglyphs are both logographic (meaning each picture is a word, actually a morpheme), alphabetic (each picture is a letter) and syllabic (each picture is a syllable).

Wait, what?! Okay, let’s back up a bit:

What is the origin of written language?

If you have no writing system whatsoever but you want to “write”, the most natural thing to do is: you draw a picture.
How do we know that? Because every single writing system started off that way, and it still happens: What do you get if you leave a kid alone with crayons (I mean aside from the need to buy new wallpaper)? The first love letters they write don’t have letters in them, they have the mum and a heart as pictures. It’s the obvious thing to do if you want to put your idea on paper and don’t know a writing system: you draw the thing.
In fact, if you go to foreign places and want to communicate, you can buy dictionaries without words even today, looking something like this:

(pssst, if you want one: ISBN 978-3-468-29840-0, Langenscheidt OhneWörterBuch) 

Back to ancient writing systems.
So, you have your wee sun symbol for “sun”. You soon figure out that you can also use that symbol for ‘bright’, ‘day’  and ‘light’. So, now your sun symbols stands in for many words, and context will tell you which one is right. Boom! Congratulations, you now have a logographic writing system.
Nice. But soon you realise that you need words you can’t find a symbol for, like the name of that new foreign merchant in town. You have a bright idea: let’s just use the symbol for a word that starts with the same sound I need for that word.

Like “fish”. You can use your ‘fish’ symbol for /f/, /fɪ/ or maybe /fɪʃ/.
So, the symbol becomes either alphabetic /f/ (like in Latin, Greek, English), or syllabic /fɪ/ (open syllable (i.e. ending in the core vowel only) like Japanese kana or Indian devanagari), or syllabic (closed syllable (i.e. a consonant follows the core vowel, also known as a coda), like in Babylonian and Hittite cuneiform)

Well, guess what the people in Ancient Egypt did:

Yeah… so, each wee picture could be a word, a letter, or a full syllable.
But, most of the time, the wee pictures are letters. So that should have meant I could get most of the words, right? Nooope.

Mistake #2 I made:
I boldly assumed every sound would be written down. But I ended up with a salad of consonants.
Bscll lk ths. Smbd frgt t b vwl.

Either the Ancient Egyptians were really bad at Wheel of Fortune or I made a mistake, unlikely as the latter is.

So, here is the problem: Turns out Egyptian Hieroglyphs are something we call an ‘Abjad’, meaning the consonants were written out, but the vowels were actively put in by the speaker and not written. Arabic and Hebrew still use systems like that. Why? It makes sense for them because their vowels change to provide the morphology (<- yes, I oversimplified that a lot):
Imagine that sing, sang, sung were all spelled sng. You’d know which one is which from context; “Today I sng”, “Yesterday I sng.”
That, of course, doesn’t work for English across the board, but it’s the closest you can get to seeing how it works if you don’t speak Arabic or Hebrew.

Okay, actually all three systems, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Arabic script, and Hebrew script, are “impure Abjads”. They sometimes spell out the vowels, or put a wee marker on a letter to give you a hint which vowel it is, but most vowels are still missing and you just have to know.

And, on top of that, you have to know which of the symbols are meant to be pronounced, and which are not.

This is point 3 I screwed up back then:
Determiners. I thought every wee picture is meant to be pronounced. Nope.
A determiner is a symbol that tells you which of the possible meanings of the next symbol to use.

For example, “Robin” could be a personal name or a bird. If you don’t want to wait for context to tell you, you could do this:

Sorted. And that is what Egyptian Hieroglyphs expanded into a full system.
You would put a wee lad at the end of male names and a wee lass at the end of female names.
Like this:

That’s Bibi and Bob. Yeah, not the most common female first name, give me a break.
Oh, by the way, hieroglyphs are usually read from right to left, sometimes from left to right, and sometimes they are a bit mixed up. But the determiners give you a good hint: the wee people and animals always look towards the beginning of the word.

Now guess what ‘family’ (Middle Egyptian: mhw.t) looks like?

Yep, the entire thing in the red circle is the determiner; a mum and a dad and the plural symbol. I guess that’s an Ancient Egyptian family: first parents, and then you make a few more humans.

You can easily see how such a system developed:
Let’s pretend English was an Abjad once more. So, only consonants are written down.
What could str be?

Getting that it is straw, star, satire, stray and stir is a lot easier with determiners, right?

This system was used so extensively that the Egyptians even came up with a marker that tells you when they mean the actual thing and not the symbol’s determiner function: a wee vertical line under the symbol would tell you it’s not a determiner:

No, I mean it this time, it’s star proper, a star star.

Cool, eh?

I wish I had known all this back then. But you know better than me now.

Want more hieroglyphs? Read this:
Zauzich, Karl-Theodor (1992). Discovering Egyptian Hieroglyphs: A Practical Guide

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Aesces to ashes

I teach fifth-grade Latin, and recently we were discussing the pronunciation of the Latin digraph and diphthong <ae>. One of my bright young scholars asked if the Latin letter was written with “one of those connected a-e thingies.”

My Anglo-Saxonist heart soared. That “connected a-e thingy” is <æ>, a symbol called by the Anglo-Saxons aesc, like an ash tree. With the adoption of the Latin alphabet, <æ> inherited all the rights and responsibilities of ᚫ, a rune of the same name in the Old English fuþorc. It was pronounced [æ]1, like in, well, ‘ash’.

My Latin class and I had to plow ahead with the nominative plural, but in the back of my mind, I kept mulling it over: Where did my beloved aesc come from, and why isn’t it all over the Classic Latin texts I read?

As with so many questions linguistic, the answer lies in human laziness. Since man started putting pen to paper (stylus to papyrus, wax, clay, &c.2), we’ve been conjoining letters to cut corners and save time and space. Cursive is one thing, but typographic ligatures are little clumps of two or three letters written as a single symbol. An example of a well-known ligature that grew up to be a letter in its own right is <w>, which as the name implies, began life as a double <u>.

There are copious examples of ligatures dating all the way back to Sumerian, but we’re investigating <æ>, and for that we have to look to medieval scribes. It’s as simple as you might imagine: Whether for speed or aesthetics, medieval scribes took <a> and <e> and wrote them as one. In Latin, it made no nevermind whether you used the ligature or wrote <ae>.3 In fact, as Latin pronunciation changed throughout the Middle Ages, the spelling was sometimes reduced to merely <e>. (Thus, we modernly tend to write “medieval” rather than “mediæval”.)

Old English wasn’t the only language to promote this particular ligature to a letter. Today, it can still be found in languages like Icelandic and Norwegian.

In Modern English, aesc has been relegated to the status of relic. It gets trotted out when calligraphers and designers want to make something look fancy or antiquated, but otherwise, it’s just some letter that we used to know.4

Notes

1 It becomes fairly obvious where linguists found the symbol to represent this sound in IPA.
2 I would just like to share that the ampersand or “and sign” (&) began life as a ligature of <et>. “Et” is “and” in Latin. I can’t even.
3 As far as Classical Latin goes, the Romans themselves and modern editors use distinct <ae> much more often than not.
4 Alas for me! I suppose I’ll just have to stick to doodling aesc in various margins.

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Ye Olde Poste of Ye New Year

Welcome one and all to the Historical Linguist Channel – 2019 edition!

This is our very first post of the year! Isn’t that wonderful – a new year of language fun!

Today, we’ll be visiting merry old England and “ye olde” – specifically, we’ll be looking at one little word there: “ye”.

You’ve probably seen it around, right? On pubs, restaurants, mills… The list can go on. But what if we told you, that this “ye” is based on a centuries-old confusion of two letters?

It’s true! The “ye” of “ye olde”, used to suggest a ‘merry, old time, showed up during the late 18th century and  hails from a scribal abbreviation used during Middle English and early Modern English.

However, let us be clear: the scribal abbreviation was not (as far as we know) pronounced “ye”. In fact, it was actually pronounced as…

“the”! Not as much fun as you expected? And now, you’re probably sitting there, wondering how the h*ck that happened, right? Well, during Middle English, and for a little while during early Modern English, English had a letter called thorn. Thorn was originally a rune, pronounced as either a voiceless or voiced dental fricative, that is [θ] or [ð]. Today, you find these sounds in words like “thing” (British English [θɪŋ]) and “the” (British English [ðə]). In writing, though, it looked like this: þ.

Now, for a rather long period of time, in cursive writing, it was common for scribes to write  “the” by using thorn with an <e> placed above it, like this:

Okay, so you know that this is actually a thorn with an <e> above it, so you know that this is a “the”. But see the very thin line at the top of the thorn below the <e>? This line is not always visible in the manuscripts: perhaps it was sometimes not written or perhaps time has taken it from us. Point is: occasionally, it may be exceedingly difficult to determine whether a letter is a thorn or a y. And someone kinda messed up and said that this, this little abbreviation, is spelled “ye” in modern English, and the mistake stuck!

So do like the HLC and smile a bit the next time you pass a “ye olde pub”, knowing that they have decided to print a huge spelling mistake on their wall.

Enjoy the knowledge and welcome back to the HLC!

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A wanty ken wit Scots is (a want ye tae show me)

This post marks the second part of my series on Scots. In the first part, I briefly outlined the history and present-day status of Scots. If you want a quick catch-up on the history but don’t feel like more reading, I recommend this video by the Angus McIntosh Centre – also available in Scots!

Hello, my lads and lassies! (Sorry, will never do that again.)

Today’s post is about the differences between Scots and English. Rather than give you a lengthy list of all the ways in which Scots differs from English, I will give you some examples and point out keys to identifying some of the more recognisable features of Scots – both historically and today. Consider this your handy guide to recognising the Scots language1.

As this is the Historical Linguist Channel, I will begin by showing you how to recognise Scots in older texts. If this is not your cup of tea, keep reading, there is something for you further down.

Historical Scots

As you may remember from my previous post, Older Scots was quite clearly distinct from English2. When we want to determine whether a piece of historical text is Scots, there are certain features we can look for. I’ll give you an example of this, using lines from a 15th century Scots poem, The buke of the Howlat (lit. ‘The book of the Owl)3.

One straightforward way to find the Scots features of this poem is to look at the spelling, and spelling can to some extent also give us clues about Scots pronunciation4. As an example, see the following line:

To luke out on day lycht
To look out on day light

Here, the <gh>5 spelling in light corresponds to <ch> in lycht. This spelling represents the sound that you might recognise from the ending of the word loch, meaning ‘lake’ (you know, where Nessie lives). If you want to be more technical, this is a voiceless velar fricative: [x]. This sound is still used in many varieties of Scots today.

This next example has more Scots features for us to unpack:

“Quhy is my face”, qȝ6 ye fle, “faʃʃonit ʃo foule,
“Why is my face”, quoth (said) the wretch, “shaped (cf. fashioned) so foully,

The strange long ‘s’, <ʃ>, is believed to sometimes represents the iconic Sean Connery pronunciation of /s/7. The first word begins with <quh->, and the correlating English spelling is <wh->; variations of <qu(h)-> are very typical Older Scots spellings, which only started to disappear in the 16th century once there was more influence from English in Scots writing. Then it was gradually replaced by the English <wh->. We are not quite sure whether this spelling also reflects a certain pronunciation, like /kw/8.

Finally, the spelling of certain word endings can also highlight features of Scots grammar. For example, the word faʃʃonit above, ending in <-it>. This is a suffix which marks past participles and adjectives, and its English equivalent is <-ed>, as in ‘I am old-fashioned’. In The buke of the Howlat we also find a typically Scots <-is> ending marking plural, as in foulis (‘fowls’; English plurals are commonly either marked by <-s> or <-es>). Present tense verbs are also marked with the <-is> ending in Older Scots: where we in English would have he sings, Scots has he singis.

Knowing about these historically Scots features helps us understand the relevance of certain features in modern Scots. It can, for example, help us figure out where certain pronunciations or word orders come from. I’ve so far used terminology which hints that some of these features have changed or disappeared. The influence by English over Scots starting in the 16th century, which I mentioned above, is commonly referred to the anglicisation of Scots (read more about the historical context for this in my last post), and it caused some decline of uniquely Scots features – especially in writing. However, as we shall see below, while some features were lost and some changed, Scots is a survivor and the modern language still uses versions of many distinctive features of Older Scots  as well as modern innovations.

Present-Day Scots

In my last post, I explained the complicated status of Scots in modern Scotland, and hinted about how much variation there is between speakers and regions as well as within the speech of one individual. Scots is not as present in formal writing as it was in its heyday, however Wee Windaes and similar sites give good example of what Scots looks like in such contexts – have a look and see how much you can understand, and where Scots differs from what you’re used to reading.

We also find plenty of good examples of modern, colloquial “Scotticisms”9 in writing, mixed  with some English. A good source of this: Scottish twitter! Reader discretion is advised; the following tweet reproductions contain strong language.

Exhibit A:

Note that the c-word is used very lightly in Scotland, sometimes even replaceable with ‘mate’.

The Scots feature I want to pick out specifically from this tweet is negation: Dinny is used where we would expect don’t if it had been written in only English. This is probably one of the most recognisable Present-Day Scots features, and -ny, or -nae, can be added to most auxiliary verbs where English would have n’t: dinny, hasny, cannae, and so on. This tweeter also uses the instead of to in “the jail” – this is something I’ve noticed Scots speakers do a lot, even saying ‘the day’ rather than ‘today’.

Exhibit B:

This tweeter not only puts into words what we all feel sometimes when we think about the state of the world, but also gives us some more excellent examples of Scotticisms. Here, I want to bring attention to the word yersel (‘yourself’), used twice. A typically Scots pronunciation feature is to not pronounce /f/ in words like self, and here we see it reflected in spelling.

Finally, Exhibit C: The iMessage conversation extract below is attached to a tweet by @jordanjonesxo.

Diverting your attention from the foul language, notice how hink is used for ‘think’. This is, as you would expect by now, reflecting a Scots pronunciation: /h/ where English has /θ/.

I haven’t mentioned all of the Scots features in these tweets – I’m sure you’re able to identify some without my help. Other features that we often see in this form of writing is aw where we expect ‘all’ and fae where we expect ‘from’. The former is an example of Scots “l-vocalisation”, meaning that /l/ is not pronounced at the end of words. The latter is simply the Scots word for ‘from’ – fae, ken (‘know’), wee (‘little’), bairn (‘child’) and mind (‘remember’) are only a few examples of Scots words which are very commonly used in Scots speech today even when mixed with English.

If you have seen or read Trainspotting, written by Irvine Welsh, I’m sure you will be familiar with the above as well as other Scotticisms. The extract below is from the sequel, Porno. See how many Scotticisms, or words and spellings you wouldn’t expect from an English text10, you can find yersells! (Pro tip: It helps to read out loud when you’re not sure what’s going on.)

Welsh, Irvine, “Porno”, Published by Jonathan Cape, 2002, p. 350.

Let us know what you found, tell us your favourite Scots word, and ask us any questions about this post – either by commenting here or on Facebook, or by emailing us (adding Lisa to the subject line will lead it straight to me).

If you now, after all this reading of Scots, want to get a good example of what it sounds like, here are some links (some repeated from earlier in the post):

The Angus McIntosh Centre’s video on the origin of Scots, in Scots.

Listen to the Buke of the Howlat (to the left on the page).

Doric Scots, contrasted with English.

Some more examples of Scots words.

 

Next week, Riccardo will bust the myth that some languages are just essentially harder to learn than others. Nay!, says we at the HLC.

Bye!

Footnotes

1Bear in mind that some of the features I bring up here are not uniform for all varieties of Scots.

2However, we also want to remember that Scots developed from a variety spoken in the North-East of England, and so some of the features described here can sometimes be found in documents from there as well. As always, we need to bear in mind that the boundaries of a “language” is not determined by national borders – see my previous post on languages and dialects.

3This analysis is based on previous work by Dr. Rhona Alcorn, Daisy Smith, Maddi Morcillo Berrueta and myself for the National Library of Scotland’s Wee Windaes website. You can find the complete version here. At Wee Windaes, you can also listen to the poem being read in Scots.

4If you’re particularly interested in mapping sounds to spelling in Scots, I recommend reading about the FITS project.

5This spelling in English used to represent the same [x] sound which is no longer a part of the English phonemic inventory.

6Abbreviations are common in old manuscripts, just imagine writing a whole book by hand! This particular one correlates to some form of ‘quoth’, as seen in the translation.

7The way Sean Connery pronounces his s’s is actually a (mainly Glaswegian) Scots pronunciation feature, which is mostly used by men.
Reference: Stuart-Smith, J., Timmins, C. and Tweedie, F., 2007. ‘Talkin’ Jockney’?: variation and change in Glaswegian accent. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(2). 221-260.

8Suggested in: Lass, R. & M. Laing. 2016. Q is for WHAT, WHEN, WHERE: The ’q’ spellings for OE hw-. Folia Linguistica Historica 37, 61–110.

9I believe this term was coined by A.J. Aitken, if I’m not mistaken.

10Not everything here is straightforwardly Scots, rather a representation of Scottish English, but as I’ve repeated many times by now: It’s complicated!

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Written “language”?

Hi everyone, Sabina here! As the resident nerd of orthography and writing systems, I am here today to talk to you about language. Shocking, I know!

When I say “language”, you might be thinking of spoken language but also, perhaps, of written language. But is “written language” actually language?

Well, yes and no. Written “language”, while sharing a lot with spoken language, is a medium through which we might use language to express ideas, thoughts and emotions, but it is not the language.

The distinction between spoken language and the written medium may sound simple enough, but the two are easily confused simply because they are very closely related. Haven’t you ever heard someone saying, with a frustrated tone, that the English language is soooo weird on the basis of spelling? Well, that’s the orthography, i.e. the rules that govern spelling, punctuation and such things, not the language.

Or perhaps that Chinese is an ideographic1 language? Well, that describes the writing system of the language, not the language (also, Chinese is logographic, but it’s a common misconception according to our resident Chinese expert, Riccardo).

Now, a writing system is a form of communication represented in a visual way. This may be through a system like the Latin alphabet (like I’m using) or the Cyrillic alphabet (like that used in Russia, e.g. алфавит ‘alphabet’) where the symbols represent sounds, or through a logographic system (like that used in Chinese, in which a written character represents a word or a phrase, e.g. 这是一个示例 ‘this is an example’). Basically, it is any way we use letters, shapes, accents and so on to convey meaning on… well, any material really, as long as it is graphically represented.

You with me so far? Great, let’s move into the tricky stuff.

Now, the writing system and the orthography of a language are derivative mediums of spoken language, usually reflecting the spoken language fairly well. However, writing may also go entirely its own way (or at least, it might seem like it).

Consider the English spelling of the word “tough”. Pronounced (in British English) as as [tʌf], it is nevertheless spelt with -gh, not f. (I’ll leave the vowels for now. We’ll offer more insight on vowels later.). So, if a written language is merely a way to express the spoken language: what’s up with that??

Well, this is the Historical Linguist Channel, after all (thought you could sneak by the history, did ya?). Such discrepancies (of which English has plenty) are often possible to explain by studying the history of the language. You see, orthography (especially spelling) is slow to change (like, really slow) and the standardisation of English was done during late Middle English/Early Modern English. English has, of course, changed quite a bit since then, but the written form of English actually still corresponds quite well (we think, at least) to the pronunciation of earlier stages of the spoken language.

While it would be convenient to have an orthography that reproduces the spoken language as exactly as possible, it would be quite difficult to create such a system. For instance, most letters pull a double (or triple or quadruple and so on) act and their pronunciation in a particular word is very dependent on the reader.

Let’s use another Swedish example here: In Swedish, the word for shrimp is ‘räka’. Now, in Gothenburg, where I’m from, this is pronounced something like ‘rää-ka’ with an open vowel ([æ:]), a vowel that, in Swedish, is traditionally associated with the letter <ä> .

However, my husband, who is from Stockholm, would pronounce the same word as ‘ree-ka’ with a much more closed vowel, perhaps something like [e:]. Yet, using the letter <e> to denote the vowel [æ:] may become an issue because the pronunciation “ree-ka” might actually be nonsensical to a lot of Swedish speakers (there’s actually a really old joke about it, talking about  a person wanting shrimp and the other person doesn’t understand what the first is asking for).

Add to that that there already is a word spelt ‘reka’ in Swedish, a clipped form of ‘rekognosera’ meaning “to explore or investigate”, and you’ll see how spelling shrimp as ‘reka’ might be an issue (especially since the pronunciation is highly dialectal and does not correspond to the pronunciation of other dialects).

There are, of course, a bunch of words that could (and perhaps should) be updated to a more ‘modern’ spelling, but the point of all this is that, while spoken and written language are closely related, we cannot expect the written form to be an exact replica of the spoken language. That being said, it would be naive of us to claim that spoken and written language are completely separate. Of course they’re not. But, at the same time, when we talk about “written language”, we must be aware that that “language” is not actually a language at all, merely a really slow-to-change expression of the spoken language. This does not mean that the study of writing systems and/or orthography is not worthwhile. Quite the opposite, especially for historical linguists whose only resource is written texts.

We cannot, and should not, expect writing to be a trustworthy representative of spoken language, and that’s okay.

Notes

1Ideographs are symbols that manage to convey their meaning independent of any particular language, like a big red circle with a line through it to mean “no”.