Last week's seminar

[cosmolinguist]

I kinda worried I was teaching my History and Varieties of English (just history, for now) seminar last week because I was the one who had to answer the question of whether our Middle English text was written after the Black Death (almost by definition, I would've thought, since the population decrease after it was one of the first triggers for the rise of English which would've been necessary before it got into the legal text we were looking at...).

And I worried that I was apparently the only person in the room who knows with the word "indicted." I mentioned it was spelled more sensibly 600 years ago -- "endyteth" in our text -- and must've been one of those words the Latin revisionists got their hands on, those people who went around adding a "b" in "debt" and stuff (indeed, "indict" is included as an example at that link, but I just looked that up now; I was guessing at the time), and no one knew what I was talking about. They said "what does that mean?" and "I translated it as 'ended'..." and stuff like that and I'm sad the tutor didn't bother to say anything about this because "indicted" and "ended" are pretty different words!

Freshers are so cute, though. We were talking about where people might go on pilgrimage and one of them said "There's The Canterbury Tales where all those people went on pilgrimage and that was somewhere down south, I don't know where..." Bless them all.

Comments

[sfred]

I hadn't thought/read about the effect of the Black Death on language. Interesting!

[cosmolinguist]

I hadn't either until recently. :) But the decline in population making laborers more valuable, meaning people earned more money and some of them started to move into cities, meant there was a critical mass of English speakers around in a way there hadn't been since the Norman conquest... sounds plausible? That's what we read/were told in the lecture anyway.

[sfred]

Cool!

[conuly]

Nothing will piss me off as much as the s in island, which is totally spurious, but I always want to say the c in indict and it annoys me. My tongue flips up there and then I end up stuttering.

[cosmolinguist]

I think the "t" in "often" got there this same way, and people say that. Or the "l" in "almond." So don't feel bad if your pronunciation is also influenced by spelling, lots of people's is. :)

[cosmolinguist]

Okay, so apparently "almond" didn't get the "l" for the same reason, it got it from Spanish. Where the theory goes it acquired the "l" because of how many Arabic loanwords Spanish has and how many of those start with "al." Cool!

[po8crg]

I was guessing that al- was Arabic, but I hadn't realised it was Spanish hypercorrection modelling on Arabic.

(IIRC, and I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong, "al-" is a determiner in Arabic (is it just "the"? Do Arabic determiners work the way English ones do?)

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, "al" (or ال) just means "the," it's the only determiner in Arabic and it is used almost the same way as English "the."

Apparently Spanish "el" (masculine singular "the") comes from ال, too (ال is actually pronounced more like "el" than "al" sometimes, depending on Things; there are only three vowels in Arabic so they cover a lot more ground than English ones).