2) Is how the "lil" appears left to poetic license?
3) What do we call such poetic words as "lil" for "little" or "o'er" for "over"?
4) Do such words appear outside of poetry? ********************************************************* 04-11-04, 10:57 AM maiku
quote:Originally posted by tsaeb: 1) Is the "lil" for "little" punctuated?
2) Is how the "lil" appears left to poetic license?
3) What do we call such poetic words as "lil" for "little" or "o'er" for "over"?
4) Do such words appear outside of poetry?
(1) I'm not sure exactly what you mean by punctuated here, tsaeb. The word is sometimes written with an apostrophe: li'l. The apostrophe stands for the t that is lost in this position in some dialects of English, or, more frequently, replaced by a glottal stop. This pronunciation is common in Brooklyn in the U.S. and in British cockney. Note that the same thing happens in the word bottle in these dialects.
(2) Poetry (or "poetic license") has nothing to do with it. The spelling li'l is a fairly good impressionistic one for the dialect version with the glottal stop, while lil is perhaps better for those cases where it is meant to be suggested that the medial t is lost altogether, as in Lil Abner. Either way, there's not much poetry to the pronunciation, at least not to my ears.
(3) See (2), above. The pronunciation (and spelling) of over as o'er is similar to the pronunciation of little as lil, I suppose, in that it also involves the loss of a medial consonant. It could be called a contraction, perhaps.
(4) These spellings occur only outside of poetry, never inside it. The fact that o'er was commonly used in Nineteenth Century verse is no excuse for using it in modern poetry. People who are acquainted with certain antiquated English expressions from their desultory reading of poetry anthologies should be informed that the use of archaic forms in old verse still sometimes read does not make their continued use "poetic."
04-11-04, 12:24 PM newnickname But, Maiku, how are you supposed to make the *@#% things scan, if you can't slur the words? Smile
04-12-04, 07:11 AM tsaeb maiku: I just knew that I should be better safe than sorry. It turns out that I was born and grew up in Brooklyn. So, please, pray tell, what is a glottal stop, lest I make a mistake in my use of "lil" in a prophecy book? (At least, I am using the "lil" outside of poetry!) Also, would you agree to calling "lil" an alternative pronunciation of "little"?
04-12-04, 09:52 AM newnickname If you want to write 'little', it's probably best to write 'little'. People can then pronounce it 'liddle', 'li"uhl', 'litto' or however they like, depending on their accent. All pronunciations are alternative, as there is no standard one.
A glottal stop is the sound produced by momentarily closing the glottis ('the space between the vocal chords', apparently). It's the sound in the middle of "Uh-oh!"
04-18-04, 06:07 AM tsaeb newnickname: I safely asked the question, because "lil" is coming up in my prophesying work. When it comes up, I should be able to usually but not always replace "lil" with "little." (As a former Brooklynite, I hope that I do not have a worse challenge: too much of a glottal stop.)
04-18-04, 03:16 PM babthrower Hi Tsaeb,
You asked:
1) Is the "lil" for "little" punctuated?"
Yes, it is usually punctuated using an apostrophe. The punctuation mark occurs where letters are omitted. But it's a colloquial word, so you can't check it by using your dictionary. Besides, it's not properly formed according to the conventions. So although it is usually punctuated with an apostrophe, you could just as well spell it 'lil'.
(When quoting colloquial speech, you can just spell phonetically. There are dictionaries of colloquial words, but that is to find their meaning, not their spelling. If we suddenly started calling masters of colloquial speech such as Elmore Leonard to task for not checking the colloquial spelling of a word, we would soon get a piece of his mind.
The conventions for indicating missing letters aren't used very consistently, anyhow.
Apostrophes are used to indicate missing letters: we say It's a shame... for It is..., and aren't for are not , dropping the space and substituting ' for the missing vowel.
But we write won't for will not. But the word is not an abbreviation for wo not. So you see, won't is constructed arbitrarily.
Similarly, if li'l is an abbreviation of little, shouldn't it be spelled li'l' or li'le ? So the apostrophe is not here used according to the rule, either.
Using an apostrophe to represent missing letters was a common practice in the 18th and 19th centuries in English. So department was abbreviated to dep't. Some of these have survived to this day. But dep't isn't one of them. Now we write dept.
Tsaeb then asks "2) Is how the "lil" appears left to poetic license?"
I'm assuming you're using the term poetic license figuratively, meaning 'with a certain degree of licence, as is sometimes used in poetry'. The answer is 'Yes'.
Sometimes I pronounce 'little' as 'lil'. Or it could be the nickname for Lillian. Is Lillian a biblical name? Or is a name in a prophecy necessarily biblical?
Why don't you just listen to the sound of the prophecy, and not worry about the spelling? Save yourself a lot of frustration. Or does your method require that you pay attention to the spelling? And punctuation?
Tsaeb asks "3) What do we call such poetic words as "lil" for "little" or "o'er" for "over"?"
Generally, we just refer to such (rather old-fashioned) affectations as "o'er" by using the term you used: poetic license. In order to make a word rhyme or keep the meter regular, we might change the pronunciation of a word. Byron does it, jokingly:
" I ... can't find any in the present age Fit for my poem (that is, for my new one); So, as I said, I'll take my friend Don Juan."
Byron was well-educated and well-travelled. He knew the correct way to pronounce the name. But he rhymes it with 'new one', knowing that his readers will smile. Besides, finding English words to rhyme with 'Don Juan' pronounced the Spanish way is pretty tough! He knew his readers knew that, too, and they would also be amused by his clever way of getting round the problem. It was an 'in' joke.
O'er would be used to keep the rhythm regular:
"The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea..."
You can see that if Gray had used over instead, it would have ruined the rhythm.
So since writing rhyming verse in regular metre is pretty tough, we allow a certain leeway (license) to the poet. But still we most admire those poets who did not need to call upon his/her readers for that favor.
Finally Tsaeb asks:
"4) Do such words appear outside of poetry?"
Sure. We call a word like 'lil' a colloquialism. That means that the word is used in common speech and ordinary conversation, but not suitable for more formal language.
Aramaic began as a colloquial language, and only later was it formalized. All language began as colloquial speech.
A lot of 20th century poets use/used colloquialisms in their work.
Dylan Thomas :
"And all the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air And playing, lovely and watery And fire green as grass."
The structure 'it was' used here repeatedly is colloquial.
I could find lots more, and I'd like to because this is fun, but this post is getting too long.
So, so long.
04-21-04, 07:37 AM tsaeb babthrower: I think that I will use "lil" and call it a "variation" of "little." How disappointing for some detailists! In prophecy, there can be any number of ways to use "lil," but so far it is important in designating the lower case of a letter, and if we put the three letters together, we get an isosceles triangle with an acute angle. Nevertheless, you just may have named that triangle!
04-21-04, 11:28 AM babthrower What do you do with the dot on the i ?
04-25-04, 06:44 AM tsaeb babthrower: Since in English "i" has a few variations, including one capital form, which is "|," we can in prophecy consider all similar forms to be equivalent. So "-" also can take the place of "i." Therefore, the dot on the "i" is thrown away. Yet, there may be uses for the dots--perhaps as a frame which is not part of a prophetic design on paper or as the grain of mustard seed, which represents all the faith in the world. Realize that when we read that Jesus is returning for a bride without a spot or a wrinkle, the interpretation is that He does not want those with an "i," which is one representation for God, as God does appear in the Bible in the first person voice of "I" (or "i" or "|"): he wants those with God. (You would love my prophecy book. Roll Eyes)
04-25-04, 10:26 AM babthrower Wouldn't that cause problems? I mean, what about the French version of the NT? All those accent aigu's, circonflexes, and so forth?
(Or should I say accents aigu?)
04-25-04, 05:57 PM FredPuli Poor old Gray, fancy suggesting he wrote o'er because 'over' wouldn't fit the metre . He may have said it that way himself. Educated speech changes over the decades just as any other; it is often noticeable that children and their grandparents have different pronunciation My grandmother and her peers said 'forrid' but most of us say 'forehead' and she would say 'ford' (written for'd Wink) not forward. If she could say 'ford' then why wouldn't Gray say 'o'er', however later generations say it?. Saying o'er for over is a feature of some dialects here even now. The native farm labourer isn't trying to sound 'poetic' to his mates in the pub when he does Big Grin
As for such words as fo'c'sle (forecastle) and bo'sun (boatswain); Gray was probably never called upon to justify his scansion of those. If he had he'd have said 'But that's how we say them , where I'm from'.
04-25-04, 06:46 PM maiku Thank you, Fred, for pointing out that "o'er" was not just a freely invented "poetic" form that Gray and others of his period stuck into their verses just for the sake of the meter. The word really was pronounced that way in some dialects, and that is the justification for its use in bygone days. "Poetic license" on this form has now expired, however. It is not just a question, as babthrower would have it, of critics preferring poets who don't have to take such license in their verse. No self respecting poet whatsoever would use this archaic form anymore.
I would also like to point out that babthrower has made a misleading claim about Byron's pronunciation of the name "Don Juan." The pronunciation current in England in his day was more or less "Don Jew'un." Byron didn't just invent this pronunciation as a joke. Brits are, of course, notorious for the way in which they fracture foreign names. Witness what they still do with the word "Jaguar."
Moreover, I must also point out that babthrower has used the word "colloquial" in a strange way when she avers that Dylan Thomas's use of "it" in his magnificent and intensely meditative poem "Fern Hill" is "colloquial." The "it" in question is the expletive "it," and it is a standard part of English and has been for centuries. Shakespeare used in often, as did the King James Bible translators (e.g. in Matthew 19:1 and frequently elsewhere in phrases such as "And it came to pass that...") The same expletive use of "it" was used by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, in the opening part "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary...." It is difficult to think of a passage less likely to be called colloquial, in fact.
I don't know much about prophecy, tsaeb, but I do know a thing or two about language, and I would hope that you and babthrower and others would stop throwing terms like "poetic license" around so loosely. There is no license of any kind anymore to use the word "o'er." You can use the contraction "li'l" (or "lil") to mean "little," if you insist, but please don't use it in what you hope to be accepted as poetry.
As for what to do with the dot on the i: I'm very fond of the apophthegm I made up myself which goes like this: The strongest force on earth is the one that keeps the dot on the i from falling down.
Incidentally, though: wouldn't an equilateral triangle be more correct, theologically, than an isosceles one?
04-25-04, 06:47 PM babthrower Imagine that! I always just assumed that he slurred it to fit the metre.
If you try to say it including the 'v' but you're very quick -- very quick -- you can say 'over' without spoiling the metre. I always assumed that was how it ought to be read. But then I head a beautiful reader (and he also read beautifully) deliver it once, and he pronounced it 'OHr' (almost 'or').
So would you say that 'o'er' is in a dialect?
04-25-04, 07:45 PM babthrower (I posted above before I read Maiku's latest. We posted almost simultaneously.)
Oh, my. I dared to disagree with Maiku on another thread, so now I will be on his 'hit list' until someone else disagrees with him, and throws him off the scent. This has happened to me before. Fortunately quite a few people disagree with him, so I assume he'll get bored pretty quickly.
I'll just make one point, and then I'll just let Maiku froth away undisturbed.
Maiku says:
"I would also like to point out that babthrower has made a misleading claim about Byron's pronunciation of the name "Don Juan." The pronunciation current in England in his day was more or less "Don Jew'un."
And how on earth do you support that statement, Maiku?
I would not mind if you or anyone else posted something like, "I don't agree that Byron was joking...." and so forth, stating reasons. A reasonable discussion might follow. The person who opposes me might find an instance in the text of the poem where the name rhymed with Jew'un and was not in a humorous context. Or some similar rational reason.
But Maiku accuses me of 'making misleading claims'...
Maiku:
Johnson's dictionary was published in 1755, and Don Juan was published in 1821.
My point? Looking as Johnson's spellings, we can see that many words were not pronounced as they are today. I have attended lectures where readers have tried to reproduce Chaucerian, Shakespearean and Stuart English; but unlike Maiku, they do not pretend to know if their pronunciation is true to life -- as it was in 1400 or in 1600 or in 1820. They freely admit this. That is because true scholars are surprisingly modest. Only braggarts pretend to an impossible level of expertise. And they fool no one.
04-26-04, 06:38 AM FredPuli Headline 'Fred Defends Maiku shock; Jackson's new lawyer not now available'
Can't speak for Canada, but we still say Don Jew'un (or some variation such as Joo-ann) here when referring to the work.It can go down as oral tradition if you like.It's what generations of teachers have called it (and my granny !). Why should they be different from the writer himself; why would, say, an Oxford educated teacher be so eccentric ? Our predecessors had little time for such thinking when Latin, Greek, French and English were the only important languages for an educated man.
By Jove, Hoooo---AHN', or however those damn foreigners do it, is up to them. It's bad enough now.I blame cheap travel of the peasantry, don'tcha know ! Big Grin Their parents went to Mah JORK er. The young kids come over all unnecessary and say they've been somewhere called MAH Horca . Can't fool me with such pretensions. They still ate fish and chips as well as that Pie Ella muck.They'll be saying Paree, Kohln and Veen next, you mark my words ! When they stop calling Reims 'Reeems' I think I'll leave the country.
Still at least Flushing is safe. Nobody takes a sail to Vlissingen (because it's pronounced ,locally , to sound like a rheumy Dutch coughing fit). Anyway, if they take the ferry they go to 'The Hook',Hoek van Holland, up the coast, perhaps en route to the Hague ('s Gravenhage/den Haag).
By the way, the resort here in Antibes, part of the town is JUAN-les-Pins. The English call that Jew'un or Joo-ann ! The French pronounce it as a cross between Spanish and French; so there is no H sound but a French J.
Maiku :I must remember to take the Bentley and not borrow a JAGG Yoo-ah when I go to the DAH-bi at Epsom this year Wink.
I appreciate, Babs , that these practices seem rather KEY HOT ICK with an emphasis on the first syllable ( it's KWIX, actually) but that's Ingles for you. I myself have had difficulty learning to say 'HAUL-ey's comet' and not Hal-ees for Halley's. We now know that's how he said his name because of contemporary rhymes and plays on words which fit only hall/haul.
Our ancestors established (we claim, confidently) how classical Latin was pronounced by similar, but vast, studies and detective work. Some scholar even found the history of some words because Emperor Justinian , idiosyncratically, did not pronounce them as they were spelled. His dialect still showed their roots but the rest of his world had moved on and the spelling had been changed as they wrote what they said how they said it. The scholar knew Justinian's way from some contemporary comment.
Footnote To be perfectly honest , I confess,even I say Don Hoo-ahn {approximately) when using Don Juan in everyday speech. So do most others around nowadays. The interesting thing is that the Jew'un version is used by me for the work. It seems odd perhaps, but that's how I was taught it and it's how academics and pretentious English pseudo-academics ( see, I know how to say it, we are in the know, we educated people Big Grin) have long done. Perhaps I should feel more awkward; it is a conscious decision for the occasion.
and: PS I call the poets Donne and Cowper 'Dun' and 'Cooper', too,of course. Some day all tour guides will be like me Smile Donne is a particular victim of theirs because of his association with St Paul's Cathedral.
04-26-04, 10:29 AM maiku
quote:Originally posted by babthrower: ... Johnson's dictionary was published in 1755, and Don Juan was published in 1821.
My point? Looking as Johnson's spellings, we can see that many words were not pronounced as they are today. I have attended lectures where readers have tried to reproduce Chaucerian, Shakespearean and Stuart English; but unlike Maiku, they do not pretend to know if their pronunciation is true to life -- as it was in 1400 or in 1600 or in 1820. They freely admit this. That is because true scholars are surprisingly modest. Only braggarts pretend to an impossible level of expertise. And they fool no one.
Pardon me, babthrower, if I ignore the distressingly hostile and ad hominem parts of your post, and concentrate on what appears to me the single substantive point you try to make (even though you seem bent on being combative there, too.)
I have not only attended lectures in which readers have attempted to reproduce Chaucerian and other forms of earlier English, I've actually given some myself. Like other linguists, I'm cautious about claiming that the reading has anything approaching the fidelity of a sound recording from Chaucer's own time. But the fact is, we can, from the highly technical study of comparative phonology, draw surprisingly accurate inferences about how Chaucerian English was pronounced. There are certain limits on the accuracy achievable. The most serious of these involves our inability to know for sure which of several sound changes that certainly happened in a historical period of say two hundred years--1300-1500 perhaps, in the case of Chaucer and his contemporaries--were actually operative simultaneously in any given stage of the language. There is also a question of dialect mixture in Chaucer, especially, and, finally, although we can be next to certain of what the phonemic contrasts were in Chaucer's English, lower level phonetic variation of the sort that goes to make up what is usually called an accent is elusive. Recognition of this level of indeterminacy has little to do with scholarly modesty. It's really a question of scholarly honesty. Like other scholars, I always insisted myself that my hearers (mostly graduate linguistics students) were fully aware of the limitations (those of the method itself and my own as well.)
If you are familiar with Johnson's dictionary, you will know that his spellings are far less systematic than the spellings of Anglo-Saxon scribes were some centuries earlier. In fact, we can't infer anything at all about pronounciation of 18th Century English just by looking at Johnson. Rather, by comparing what we know about how words have turned out to be pronounced with our inferences of where they must have started from--and this involves reconstruction of the very earliest forms of English by comparisons with related languages--we can arrive at very sound conclusions.
One of the amazing results of comparative phonology has been the discovery of the great regularity of sound changes. The vowel we have in the modern English word "to," for example, was pronounced by Chaucer so as to rhyme with modern English "toe." But not only that: this same vowel underwent the very same change everywhere (that is, at least where the phonetic environment was sufficiently similar).
Byron's pronunciation of "Juan" as "Jew'un" is not something we could infer in this way from the history of the word in English, mainly because it is not an English word to begin with. We know he pronounced it that way, though, because of what Fred called above the oral tradition (my teacher pronounced it that way, too), and because of the persistence of this same pronunciation in British English to this very day. Finally, we can infer from Byron's very use of the rhyme itself that at least he meant it to be pronounced with two syllables.
I quite agree that Byron's rhyming of "Juan" with "new one" is humorous. He would not have made this kind of light, off-beat rhyme in any very serious context. But it is entirely in keeping with what he does throughout in "Don Juan." A better example of a light rhyme used for humorous effect is this one:
But tell me you Lord's of ladies intellectual, Is it not true that she has henpecked you all?
04-26-04, 10:33 AM babthrower Fred:
Of course. My prof pronounced it Don Joo'an too. That's how it's used in the poem, in every single line where it forms an ending and must rhyme. It's probably entered the folklore.
See what I mean? The poem pronounces it joo'en. That's obvious. (I've quoted lines above.) So those referring to the poem pronounce it joo'an. That is not the question. The question is, was Byron joking (perhaps even making fun of those who, as you illustrate, did not pronounce it properly?) The poem is a mass of jokes: jokes piled on jokes. And mockery of all forms of pretentiousness. The sophisticated folks knew how to pronounce it, and would have enjoyed a joke at the expense of the pretentious intelligentsia.
My Romantic Period poetry prof said that all gentlemen who could afford it in those days did the continental tour; it was part of what was considered a good education (along with public school and the right university). Byron did the Grand Tour in 1809. It was normal during those lengthly trips abroad to spend time with their opposite numbers (equal class status) among the Europeans, and there become cultivated and sophisticated by exposure to other languages and high culture.
So they would have the elements of the major languages -- German, Spanish, Italian, French at least.
Now I ask you. Does a class-conscious, inherently snobbish, but fairly poor aristocrat, such as Byron was, display his knowledge to prove that he'd been there, done that? Or does he use a vulgarism in anything but fun? Byron was wildly popular in his day. He was the 'rock star idol' of the decade. The humorous usage would have entered the language just as certain phrases from the Rolling Stones have entered our culture: "I got a thirty-eight special, b'lieve it do very well..."
So 'b'lieve it do very well' might well become common usage among fans; but that does not mean the usage is what cultivated people normally use.
You see, my point is none of the following people know how the word was normally pronounced in 1820 by cultivated folk:
Fred Puli babthrower babthrower's English professor Maiku
I take my prof's opinion, because to me it makes sense. You don't, for the reasons you have stated. That's okay, it's a free country.
What I resent is that our mutual friend accused me of 'misleading', and proceeded to assert something which none of us can possibly know for sure: was Byron joking or was he mispronouncing the word because everyone else did?
04-26-04, 12:58 PM maiku Babthrower: The flaw in your extraordinarily tenacious defense of your mistaken position about rhyme and meter in poetry in general, and about the "Don Juan" case, in particular, is as follows (actually, there are several flaws, but this is the most important one):
A joke fails to be a joke when nobody can get it. It follows from your own asumption then, that Byron must have been playing upon a current pronunciation of "Juan" that he was confident people would recognize. He did not freely invent this pronunciation. It was current in his day. This is all quite irrespective of your quibble about how Byron, as "cultivated" as he was, might have pronounced "Juan" had he been speaking Spanish. He was writing in English, of course, so he adduced a current English pronunciation.
Now here are three people who know that Brits are notorious for fracturing foreign names: Fred Puli, babthrower, and maiku. So it is no surprise that this pronuciation was ready-made and available to Byron. He took in over as it was (just as Gray took over "o'er" as it was).
But here is what was so misleading about what you claimed when you first brought Don Juan up. You wrote:
In order to make a word rhyme or keep the meter regular, we might change [italics mine] the pronunciation. Byron did it jokingly:
You see, the last thing Byron did was change the pronunciation of anything. If poets went around changing the pronunciation of words willy-nilly, they would defeat their own purposes, because no-one would know how to read their lines.
It's entirely possible that Byron would have disdained this popular pronunciation otherwise. But he used it to produce an off-beat femine rhyme just because he knew he could get away with it. He didn't invent anything, and he didn't change any speech forms.
"Poetic license" evidently means a lot of different things to different people. What it does not, and cannot, mean, is that a poet is free to use any kind of sound he likes, Humpty-Dumpty-wise, to mean anything he likes. For the most part, in our time it has meant the deliberate use of archaic forms well beyond their expiration date. This practice is now generally frowned upon. Poets are not free anymore to use "o'er" instead of "over" for the sake of the meter or for the sake of anything else. 04-26-04, 01:20 PM Sarai
quote:Originally posted by maiku:
A joke fails to be a joke when nobody can get it
Bab gets it. Wink
Personally, whether it was meant as a joke or not, I think it's hilarious. Don Joo-an? I think it's really funny, whether it was meant to be or not. And the line Babs quotes from the poem made me laugh out loud.
04-26-04, 01:45 PM maiku "lil" for "little"? We all get the "joke," Sarai.
It's an amusing rhyme (a pretty poor excuse for an academic joke, at best). But it rhymes because that pronunciation of "Juan" existed, not because Byron invented it.
PS: Does the British pronunciation of "Jaguar" crack you up, too, Sarai?
04-26-04, 02:09 PM Sarai No. But the word "nappy" does. Our pronunciation of many words and our many "Americanisms" crack the British up, too.
P.S. Since when must humor be academic?
04-26-04, 02:18 PM maiku
quote:Originally posted by Sarai: Since when must humor be academic?
It doesn't. In fact, it's usually funnier to most people when it isn't.
04-28-04, 01:12 AM Ritzmar And isn't it all such fun? Big Grin
04-28-04, 03:21 AM Fourbrick One of the Americanisms that really cracks us up over here, is that American men wear "suspenders". Only women over here wear them (a la Sally Bowles in Cabaret) Big Grin
04-28-04, 06:32 AM FredPuli And if some American man introduces himself to a woman here by saying " Hi, I'm Randy" what is she to make of this offer (if that's what it is; it could be an early warning Big Grin )?
04-28-04, 08:26 AM tsaeb babthrower: I try not to prophesy by beginning with a language other than English. So I am glad that there are no accents in English of which I can immediately think. As for the "'" for the contractions, they can be added or removed--just as the original manuscript of the Bible lacked punctuation.
maiku: Gee, I thought that you were a mathematician of soughts, not a linguist. As for your question as to why "lil" would not better make an equilateral triangle (given that l=i in prophecy in length and meaning), what matters most is the leading of the Holy Spirit. He goes with the isosceles triangle. Also, most people would not think that in prophecy l=i in length and meaning; however, in prophecy when it comes to observing tongues, the size and meaning of characters may change. For example, "0|0" can become "%." Of course, the representation of the Holy Spirit has an isosceles triangle, but another representation may have an equilateral triangle with the same letters, depending on the leading of the Holy Spirit, God's purpose, context, and whatever else kicks in as relevant.
05-02-04, 12:46 PM babthrower Hey, wait a minute!
I have an email from "Henry the Lurker" who commented at length on the quotation from Gray and FredPuli's post. The main thing this Brit said was that Gray's Elegy was not written in dialect, but was written in standard, somewhat elevated, English of the day ( except for a few lines in quotation which Gray attributed to an elderly countryman).
I replied asking Henry the Lurker to post. He/she said he doesn't want to get involved in an acrimonious dispute. I don't know his Answerpool handle. Maybe he's not registered.
(Just to remind everyone: here is a stanza written in dialect. It's not by Gray. I include it to demonstrate dialect, usually the spoken language of the local people. In Gray's day, the common people were not usually literate.)
"As I came in by Auchindoun, A little wee bit frae the town, When to the Highlands I was bound To view the Haughs of Cromdale. I met a man in tartan trews, I spiered at him what was the news, Quo' he, "The Highland army rues That e'er we came to Cromdale."
The other thing we need is a definition of 'poetic licence'. The term is not useful these days, and sounds rather quaint. It was first used in 1530: "lycence poetycall". In Byron's day, in Gray's day, when the fashion was for rhymed and metered verse, it was useful.
Here are a couple of definitions of poetic licence:
"The freedom to depart from correctness and grammaticality sometimes extended to poets by generous readers who believed that the poets knew better but needed such effects to be true to their subject."
"Deviation from form or rule by a writer, an artist, etc."
"A writer's or artist's transgression of established rules for effect."
The effect, in Gray's case, was of course beautiful lines, which when read aloud by a cultivated person, gave immense pleasure to the listeners. In those times, (about 1750) reading aloud of both prose and poetry was very popular. No radio or television; travel by horse only.
Piqued by Henry the Lurker, I decided to dig a little deeper. As to the use of o'er , here's what my Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles has to say.
o'er: poetic and dialectical contraction of over, dating from the 16th century
Now, quoting from Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
" The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea..."
This is what I referred to in my post above.
I re-read the whole poem. (I had not read it for years!) Lurker is right. It is in standard English. In fact, the tone is quite stately and dignified.
"Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile The short and simple annals of the Poor."
Here are some examples of poetic licence used by Gray in the remainder of the poem. In each and every case, to give the word its normal pronunciation would add an extra beat, and ruin the iambic pentameter.
" Now fades the glimm'ring landscape on the sight"
" Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r"
" Of such, as wand'ring near her secret bow'r"
" Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap"
" The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed"
" The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, Awaits alike th' inevitable hour…"
" … If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise…"
"Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death"
" Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll"
" Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen"
"Th' applause of list'ning senates to command"
" To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes,"
"Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect"
"Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse"
" This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd"
" Nor cast one longing, ling'ring look behind"
"Ev'n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries"
"Ev'n in our ashes live their wonted fires"
"For thee, who mindful of th' unhonour'd Dead"
"Mutt'ring his wayward fancies he would rove"
"Along the heath and near his fav'rite tree"
"Heav'n did a recompense as largely send"
"He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear"
These quotations above are all those which contain ellipsis in order to maintain the meter. I have omitted cases in which an apostrophe replaced an omitted past-tense 'e' -- for example,
"Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd".
This spelling suggests that the 'e' might have been pronounced in standard English of the time. We don't signify the ellipsis now, because we don't pronounce the 'e'. But we don't know for sure if it was pronounced then.
And here's the smoking gun:
"Each in his narrow cell for ever laid"
"And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave"
Why did Gray use 'ever' in the first case, and 'e'er' in the second? Because of the meter. He's using poetic licence.
************** Footnote:
I don't understand this one:
" Where thro' the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault"
unless the ending "ough" of "through" was pronounced as a diphthong in about 1750. Or possibly it was for visual effect: to shorten the line length.
through - metathesis of O.E. þurh, from W.Gmc. *thurkh, from PIE base *tr-. Not clearly differentiated from thorough until early Mod.Eng.
Maybe Gray was making sure that the reader would not say ‘thorough’ instead of ‘through’.
05-02-04, 02:54 PM maiku Apparently, babthrower, the term dialect is for you (as it unfortunately is for many) a rather pejorative, even abusive one. This is not the case for its use by careful students of language. Students of language are profoundly aware that everyone speaks a dialect of some kind (even you and I), and that there is no linguistically significant distinction to be drawn between what is regarded as the standard, literary dialect of a given country (or even empire) and other closely related forms of the language. Everyone speaks a dialect. Some dialects have greater prestige than others, that’s all.
The verse you cite as written in dialect is written in Scot’s English. Robert Burns, the national poet-hero of Scotland, wrote in essentially this same dialect. He would have been mortified, I’m sure, to learn that his ringing lines
O ye wha are sae guid yoursel, Sae pious and sae holy, Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tell Your neebor’s fauts and folly! Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill Supplied wi’ store o’ water, The heapet happer’s ebbing still, And still the clap plays clatter,--
or, better yet,
Scot’ wha’ hae wi’ Wallace bled
and so on, are not, in their own way, highly dignified, because written in what you, apparently, abjure as a low form of language reserved mainly for the peasantry and the uneducated labouring masses.
Now Gray’s own dialect enabled him to use forms such as o'er in his verse, where, as you correctly observe, this fit the meter better than the fuller form over. Conclusion? Gray’s dialect included both forms, in what linguists call free variation. This is no different from the case of my own dialect, and very possibly yours, where alternate phonetic forms exist and can be used almost interchangeably. Like Gray, in fact, I can pronounce the word favorite alternately as fav'rite (That’s what I usually do.) There are many such other example in my dialect where unstressed vowels may be optionally elided. Gray went farther in his dialect, but the rule is essentially the same, and his usage disagrees with mine only in the question of which particular cases can be optionally so truncated. In some other cases, my dialect now prefers the truncated form in all cases. This is so for the word listening, for example, which I always pronounce with two syllables, as Gray did (perhaps optionally, perhaps not) rather than three.
The most useful thing you said in your post above is that "the term poetic license is not useful these days, and sounds rather quaint." I agree completely, and that’s what I’ve been trying to get across from the beginning. Now, if we could also agree to drop the unfortunate and unscholarly sense of the word dialect you appeal to, we might be better able to get along with less of what you, but not I, want to characterize as acrimony.
05-02-04, 04:00 PM juanruiz I'm really not sure what the big brouhaha here is all about. Language is in a constant state of change, subject to metathesis, dissimilation, haplology, and other forces. If that were not the case, Cervantes' masterpiece would have been titled Dominus Quixotus and we English speakers would still be using a highly inflected language.
05-02-04, 04:47 PM Ewood27 I find it of some interest that as a 20th century born Englishman I could read almost all of the apostrophised lines quoted by Babthrower in their non-truncated form quite easily without spoiling the metre. Only those where the letter v has been omitted, "o'er", "e'er" and "ne'er", would still have to be altered. The rest, even "ev'n" and "th'", would fall easily from my lips in time with the metre. Several, e.g. "fav'rite", "Heav'n", "hist'ry", are pretty well how I would say them in everyday speech.
Is it the same in American English?
05-02-04, 04:55 PM babthrower Newnickname says:
"Maybe Gray was making sure that the reader would not say ‘thorough’ instead of ‘through’."
Thanks, that's a handy site. I've added it to my favorites.
I've always been curious about the pronunciation in the days before there arose the idea of 'standard' English. For example, in 1553 (long before Johnson's dictionary) a diarist wrote of seeing a procession pass his London shop. He wrote they had 'selver' 'spangulls' and 'chynes' of gold. The street was 'hangyd wyth' black. I have heard modern Irish speakers pronounce 'silver' 'selver'.
'Hangyd' revives the question I raised in my last post: does a form such as sway'd suggest that the ed was a distinct syllable?
We do hear it so pronounced in some contexts. For example, Rossetti's
The blessed damozel lean'd out From the gold bar of Heaven...
in which the meter requires that blessed be spoken with two syllables.
I have even seen blessed spelled with a grave accent over the final e, just so we won't possibly miss the point, in religious writings.
But was it sounded only when poetic meter required it? Or was it also normally sounded in prose, in everyday speech?
So we might speculate that 'chains' which we use today is not a good phonetic representation of how the word was spoken then. But their pronunciation may be preserved in existing dialects today, in at least two that I can think of.
It's too bad that that dictionaries can preserve only the definitions of other days, but not the pronunciations. The typical key to pronunciation works sort of like this:
{some symbol} represents the sound of ng as in sing.
But I hear sing pronounced two different ways: one in which a definite 'g' sound is produced, the other not. Therefore both ways of pronouncing the word are 'right'. But unless one already knows that some others do not pronounce it as one does, one would have no clue from the pronunciation key.
Now there are sound recordings of various pronunciations, which will make the task of figuring out what people sound[ed] like a little easier in the future.
05-02-04, 05:52 PM maiku Ewood asks how far American English agrees with his variety of English, which is able to account for the elided unstressed syllables of Gray's poem with no problem. The short answer: mostly.
As I tried to indicate above, the same general process is going on in your speech, Ewood, as in mine and in Gray's. Unstressed vowels can be optionally deleted. Often, both possible pronunciations exist side-by-side in free variation. Thus, I can say "fav'rite," (as I usually do), but if I'm singing the song from the Sound of Music, I pronounce it "favorite," in keeping with the rhythm of that song.
I also mentioned in particular the word "listening" above, which occurs in the passage from Gray's poem quoted by Babthrower. As far as I am aware, this is always pronounced with only two syllables--by me and other American speakers of my dialect of English.
Like you, Ewood, and most Americans I know, I cannot get "ne'er," "ev'n," and "e'er" as possible variants of "never," "even," and "ever," respectively. But clearly Gray could. (Correction: you said you could get "ev'n." We Americans cannot.)
"Heav'n" is not natural for me at all, either. However, to be accurate, I don't really have a vowel immediately before the "n" in this word. What I have in every case of the pattern -obstruent+unstressed vowel+sonorant is a syllabic sonorant (n,m,l,r), with loss of the preceding vowel. But words such as "heaven,", "even," "never," "little", "rhythm," and so on, continue to be two syllable words for me.
Babthrower asks whether Gray's spelling of past tense -ed as 'd indicates, in Gray's period, that there was still some variation in the production of this inflectional ending (which there certainly was, earlier). The answer is that the full syllabic pronunciation was common only in the use of forms inflected in this way as adjectives--derived from past-participle forms of the verb. Keats, some half-century later, could still speak of "twinéd flowers," and in fact, "blessed," is still commonly pronounced with two syllables in phrases such as "the blessed martyrs," but never in the case of the verb. In "The priest blessed the congregation and dismissed it," the word is now only one syllable, and the past tense verb inflection had been reduced (except following a stem ending in "d" or "t," still the modern practice) well before Gray's time.
05-02-04, 06:53 PM FredPuli Like Ewood I have no difficulty in reading the supposed poetic spelling. Indeed I can go further. Nearly all of it sounds exactly how I or others in my mob (sorry,'circle' or 'peers'; must remember I'm out) do pronounce it now and/or our parents or grandparents do or did; there is nothing of the 'poetic' or of 'licence' about it.We do not say mould-er-ing but mouldring nor pow-er but 'powr' and so on, just as my grandmother said 'forrid' not 'fore-head' before me (the latter pronunciation, incidentally, marked you out as definitely not U; not old upper class ). I would say 'power-ful' though if making emphasis;there is some latitude , case to case.
Heav'n and ev'n are so common in British English dialects that they pass as normal everywhere (it isn'tdifficult to find ).
The ones that we do not hear generally, at least in the South East are e'er, o'er, and "th'inevitable" and other abbreviated 'the's. That said, we still say 'ne'er -do -well' for a hopelessly idle person, a good- for -nothing, so that has survived to show us that 'never' once lacked its V sound in everyday speech.Some local people say 'o'er' though, around here. E'er' is to be found in England yet. As for th' for 'the' there are whole tracts of the North of England where they say "th'ole" for "the whole " : " Th'ole street was upset by it ". (Just to confuse us, perhaps, they'll say "t'hospital" for 'the hospital' in much of Lancashire ) .
As for the case of 'for ever' we now write 'forever'. Why? It looks as though when 'ever' (or whenever 'ever' Wink ) was preceded by 'for' Gray and others said 'ever' . To think that 'for ever' and 'e'er' in the same poem or the same line shows an inconsistency explained by metre is to think erroneously.
It is an odd claim anyway. Why should a poet such as Gray, an educated and, surely, talented exponent have difficulty with metre ? Why should he hack his words about to cram them in, rather than choose different words in the first place? He would have had to study Greek and Latin metre from his earliest days. He would not have seen the classical writers who he was forced to study hacking their words about to fit the metre. There is and was no stricter form than classical poetry when it came to metre. It makes it exceptionally difficult both to write and to read perfectly (the reader must know the stresses in every word in every form; students won prizes for reading it, not just for composing it ). Every dactyl and every spondee has to be just so. After all somebody invented all those strange words like 'iambic' and 'pentameter' that we use now. Wink
05-02-04, 08:06 PM babthrower I do not question how you pronounce words. This is 2000+, and this poem was published in 1750. Two hundred and fifty years is not an inconsiderable time. Heck, that was less than one hundred fifty years after Shakespeare. Do you imagine that your ancestors spoke exactly as you do now in the time of Shakespeare?
Both you and Maiku claim to know how all these words were pronounced then; but you don't explain how you know. You at least have made an effort to explain: you claim that the language did not change from generation to generation.
I have just one question. If Gray pronounced those words exactly as you do now, why didn't he spell them as you do now: that is, what on earth was he trying to convey via all of those apostrophes? 05-02-04, 08:14 PM maiku
quote:Originally posted by FredPuli ...As for the case of 'for ever' we now write 'forever'. Why? It looks as though when 'ever' (or whenever 'ever' Wink ) was preceded by 'for' Gray and others said 'ever' . To think that 'for ever' and 'e'er' in the same poem or the same line shows an inconsistency explained by metre is to think erroneously.
It is an odd claim anyway. Why should a poet such as Gray, an educated and, surely, talented exponent have difficulty with metre ? Why should he hack his words about to cram them in, rather than choose different words in the first place? He would have had to study Greek and Latin metre from his earliest days. He would not have seen the classical writers who he was forced to study hacking their words about to fit the metre. There is and was no stricter form than classical poetry when it came to metre. It makes it exceptionally difficult both to write and to read perfectly (the reader must know the stresses in every word in every form; students won prizes for reading it, not just for composing it ). Every dactyl and every spondee has to be just so. After all _somebody_ invented all those strange words like 'iambic' and 'pentameter' that we use now. Wink
Shock! FredPuli supports maiku again! (though he semi-decorously refrains from admitting as much directly).
In your first paragra
This message has been edited. Last edited by: DorianGreyed,
What a lot of words about one lil one. *************************************** 05-04-04, 09:44 AM Ewood27 But, Karrow,
1) Is the "lil" for "little" punctuated?
2) Is how the "lil" appears left to poetic license?
3) What do we call such poetic words as "lil" for "little" or "o'er" for "over"?
4) Do such words appear outside of poetry?
Oops, those questions have been asked already, haven't they?
Hang on, I feel a song in there somewhere. How's this?
There's a hole in my bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza, ... ********************************************************* 05-04-04, 11:04 AM babthrower Thanks, you two, for the light touch. Smile ********************************************************* 05-05-04, 04:01 PM doñadiana So, Juan: How do you want your name pronounced:
jew'n?
joo AHN?
hoo AHN?
hwan?
DD Big Grin ********************************************************* 05-05-04, 05:50 PM juanruiz I'm afraid if I answer that, DD, it will generate a whole 'nother debate. (Oh no, please don't discuss my use of 'nother! Eek ) ********************************************************* 05-05-04, 09:08 PM maiku According to his own signature, juanruiz is from "Medieval Spain." He doesn't say what part, though, so perhaps he pronounces his first name in the Catlán fashion, like Joan Miró did (as I suggested already in a whole nother thread). Moreover (not to be pronounced as "moreo'er), he also claims (and I believe him) close acquaintance with various Italian dialects, so I figure he could also pronounce it as "Giovanni," for all we know.
Or maybe, if the truth were known, it's just plain "John."
Notice how all these variants are closer to the sometime British English "Jew'un" than they are to the standard Castilian?
You asked us not to discuss your use of "a whole nother," Juan, so I won't. But may I at least put a name to this kind of expression? It's what's known as tmesis, or, as I also like to call it, "t—mucking—mesis." ********************************************************* 05-06-04, 03:57 AM FredPuli And at the other end to tmesis it's apocape or apocopation I'm thinkin'. Isn't that correct, maiku ?
Here , as already noted long ago by GBS in his satire, great importance has long been attached to accent and pronunciation. It was a defining marker of standing and background.Nowadays we still have the ear for it because that comes with the culture, though most claim that it is of much less importance than formerly.
Apocapy has the remarkable distinction of being thought invariably wrong by the 'middle classes' but perfectly acceptable, indeed normal, by the lowest and the highest. So the 'working class' say they've been " racin' at Ascot " and many of those in the Queen's circle,young and old, will be doing and saying exactly the same. (They are not "huntin', fishin' and shootin' " then of course, those sports being out of season). The Queen's grandfather at a major race meeting , seeing a friend dressed in the newly fashionable tweeds, famously yelled out " Goin' rattin', Harris ?" thereby sarcastingly adding a fourth to these apocopate country pursuits.
P.S I've just realised that " Whate'er (you do)" is almost universal here either as standard or or as an alternative to 'whatever' in colloquial speech. Let's not start a thread on compounds though. As the little girl said " This book tells me more about penguins than I want to know.." Smile ********************************************************* 05-07-04, 11:52 AM maiku Fred: I can think of no example that would combine an allusion to Shavian linguistic satire with tmesis and apocope better than Liza Dolittle's abso-bloomin'-lutely.
There are one or two flaws in this example, unfortunately: it is GBS only by way of Lerner and Loew, as near as I remember, and besides, Liza's bloomin' in place of blooming is, like your other examples above, arguably not a true instance of apocope.
Apocope is the loss of final sounds in words, and this was an important process in the development of modern English from Middle English, for instance, when the infinitive ending of verbs was lost and also final unstressed -e in the declension of adjectives, among other changes of the same sort
The cases you mention, along with Liza's bloomin', are often popularly characterized as "loss of final g." According to the usual structuralist analysis of English phonology, however, this is a mistake: these words never had any final "g" in them that they might have lost at the time the latter change happened. The "g" of the original -ing or -inge suffix had before then been totally assimilated by the preceding nasal, becoming a velar nasal in contrast to the usual alveolar nasal of words like "pin." The result, so the structuralists claimed, was the introduction of an entirely new phonemic contrast between two nasals--the alveolar nasal of "pin" vs. the velar nasal of "ping," say, neither of these containing anything like a "g." So that what Liza and others did was not to lose the "g," but to substitute one phoneme for the other.
The deeper analysis of transformational phonology, though, turns out to justify after all the notion that these cases involve the loss of a "g." In this analysis, there is no velar nasal "phoneme" in English, contrasting with the more familiar "n" and "m." Instead, this sound is the reflex of a cluster, represented in the abstract lexical form as n+g, just as in the normal, common sense English spelling. The nasal then proceeds to become velarized (as it did, historically), and in some, but not all positions, the "g" is then deleted. Thus it is that today we still retain the "g" in the standard English pronunciation of "longer," but have lost it in the form "long." (Note: speakers of certain dialects from "Longg Island" still have this "g" in their speech.)
This analysis explains lots of other things the structuralist analysis could not. The nasals "n" and "m" occur freely in word-initial position, and they may follow tense vowels and the diphthongs which resulted from the still later Great Vowel Shift. The supposed velar nasal phoneme, though, was always seen to be defective in its distribution in these regards. It never occurs word-initially, and there is no contrast between tense and lax vowels occuring before it. Treating "ng" as a consonant cluster explains these facts in a totally natural and convincing way.
Incidentally: in my pronunciation of the word "penguin," I have a "g." Penguins, on the other hand, are incapable of articulating this word, with or without a "g." Smile
This message has been edited. Last edited by: maiku, 05-07-04 03:32 PM ********************************************************* 05-08-04, 12:05 AM AMoore
quote:Originally posted by maiku: Fred: I can think of no example that would combine an allusion to Shavian linguistic satire with tmesis and apocope better than Liza Dolittle's _abso-bloomin'-lutely_.
- snip -
consider the following exchange which I once heard on a London bus.
Driver (cockney), calling the stop: "'Annover square."
Passenger (sounding rather "public school"): "Oh, driver, you dropped an 'H' there."
Driver: "Not to worry, Gov'nor. Pick 'im up again at Hoxford."
Alan Moore ********************************************************* 05-08-04, 06:03 PM babthrower Thank you, Alan! That is funny!
Just posting a last word for my British lurker who tells me she's (yes, Henry is a woman, as it turns out) from Ireland, and grew up near Dublin, and also attended University College Dublin, where she says the religious and political debates in Finnigan's (?) set a certain standard for throwing heat as well as light on a subject.
"So I don't need anyone to explain to me what is, and what is not, 'acrimony'." ********************************************************* 05-08-04, 07:06 PM FredPuli Never mind about all that stuff ! Maiku has got me worried sick now. Erudite, he calmly posts an explanation which is educational and interesting but in the middle of it refers blithely to "The Great Vowel Shift " What on Earth was that ? Was it like the Great Fire, the Great Earthquake, the Great Plague, The Great War? Sudden and cataclysmic or slow and painful ?
Supposing it happens again ? Shouldn't we be told ?
I suppose our ancestors went 'OOOOOH !' as they saw it coming but AAAAAAH! when it had gone; the Great Vowel Shift had struck them right in the middle ! If only they had duct taped their mouths shut they might never have been hit and their vowels would have stayed unshifted. Perhaps those in remote hillside areas were spared, who knows? ********************************************************* 05-08-04, 08:13 PM babthrower Thanks, Fred. Sometimes I need a reality check.
My hunch is that there is no way to avoid it, not even NASA has a plan -- and NASA even has a plan to save us from the Great Meteorite Which Will Cause Mass Extinction Including Us Menace (GMWWCMEIUM)(pronounced gumwickmayum)!
Public awareness would only lead to despair and mass suicide pacts. Therefore it is in the public interest to say as little as possible. ********************************************************* 05-08-04, 11:11 PM maiku Do you mean to tell me, Fred, with all your schooling you've never heard of the Great Vowel Shift? I'm shocked!
Even if the subject wasn't covered in your law studies, how about all that time you spent studying Latin? Did none of your teachers ever point out that Englishmen pronounced the vowels a,e,i,o, and u differently than the Romans did, and in fact differently than nearly everyone else in Europe does today?
In brief, it was the process of sound change known as the Great Vowel Shift (don't, please, call it the Great Vowel Movement) which accounts for this peculiarity of English.
This process had already started in Chaucer's day in some dialects, but it wasn't complete until after Alexander Pope. His rhymes of words like obey and tea, for example (in "The Rape of the Lock"), show that for him and his contemporaries the process was not entirely finished.
Below is a short list of reliable, scholarly books which treat of this subject.
Pyles, Thomas. The Origin and Development of the English Language
Baugh, Albert C. A History of the English Language
Jespersen, Otto. Growth and Structure of the English Language
Robertson, Stuart. The Development of Modern English
Wyld, Henry Cecil. A History of Modern Colloquial English ********************************************************* 05-08-04, 11:36 PM babthrower Or you can hearit at:
http://alpha.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/ ********************************************************* 05-09-04, 12:25 AM maiku That's an interesting link you gave there, Babthrow'r.
I checked it out myself, and I can report that it seems to have all the main facts straight, at least. And of course for many of us, it's likely to be far easier to take than an actual book would be. Eek
Still, anyone seriously enough interested in language, or who pretends to give authoritative answers to questions about its history and development, ought to pay some attention, it seems to me, to the primary literature on language, for which there is not really any Internet ersatz.
Even the author of your site, Babthrow'r, cites one or two of the books I mentioned above.
I repeat: If you want to learn much of anything about this subject, read a book (or two). Wink ********************************************************* 05-09-04, 02:37 AM Ewood27 Maiku, I'd never heard of the Great Vowel Shift either until I read of it in one of your posts some time ago. I took Latin at school as far as University entrance level, and of course was taught vowel pronunciation different from contemporary English.
It was never directly explained. I took it that Romans were foreigners, and a long time ago. Things change over 2,000 years, even from Latin to modern Italian. I just accepted the difference. As for other modern Europeans, they're foreigners and they're wrong. Simple as that! ********************************************************* 05-09-04, 04:51 AM FredPuli That's about it Ewood. The Romans of course were civilised foreigners. We cannot forget, for example, that they gave us roads that have survived intact until the present day, unlike our own, built twenty years ago. They were so civilised and advanced that they presciently counted backwards. (Caesar landed in Britain in 55 but went away and came back the following year 54).What more can one say ?
They also caused our schoolchildren hours, indeed years, of innocent amusement learning the stresses and long/short vowels in their language word by word, not forgetting that the length may change in different forms of the same word.
Maiku B does become V doesn't it and vice versa ( or 'wee-kay were-sah') ? So concern about V-owel shift could need care when speaking. Perhaps Oliver Cromwell, addressing Scottish Presbyterians has been misunderstood ? It was their bad accent and pronunciation and not their politics or plans that concerned him ? He wrote to them " I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, that it is possible that you are mistaken " It's a bit blasphemous. either way.
Naturally Latin pronunciation remained fixed throughout the classical period (once the C19 British and German scholars had decided what it was ,that is). Cicero's scansion and Cicero's vowels were as Ovid's or Caesar's of course (!). No vowel shifts there, thank you very much.
In a distinction which only lawyers could devise legal Latin is not pronounced 'correctly'. This was to mark out the educated layman as an outsider trespassing in a land where an application is adjourned without a date being fixed, 'Sigh, knee ,dye' not 'sin-nay dee-ay' (approximately) [sine die ] . That's a different matter; identify the non-fee paying 'litigant in person' or legal outsider and hunt him down. Latin in church is another exception; it is strongly influenced by local dialect and by the evolution of the pronunciation of Latin within the Church in Italy over centuries. ********************************************************* 05-09-04, 12:36 PM maiku Like all natural languages, Latin also changed over time. When we say that the pronunciation of classical Latin became fixed, that is true by definition, really, because classical Latin is the name of a particular stage of the language--though a rather long one--during which it changed little. It is only in this sense that Latin can be said to be a dead language. If we were to define Chaucer's English as a kind of classical English, that too, would be dead.
It is truer of languages, though, than it is of people, that they live on in their descendants. Latin survives to this day as living Italian, French, Spanish, and so on. And of course all of these daughter languages changed, and continue to change, each in its own way.
An interesting example to look at is the word for fire. The classical Latin word was ignis, but this is not the ancestor of the ordinary word for fire in any of the Romance languages. The ancestor instead was the word focus, a Vulgar Latin word that meant hearth.
This word became fuego in Castilian and is scarcely recognizable in its French form, feu. The original Latin is better preserved in the Catlán descendant than any other: foc.
These changes are vivid enough, but what makes the English Great Vowel Shift stand out is its wholesale, radical restructuring of the vowel system. Nothing comparable happened in any of the Romance languages.
We must also remember that scribes in countries other than England were wise enough to update their transcriptions fairly regularly, so that the spelling continued to match pronunciation. Not so in England. Chaucer's spelling, which used the usual "Continental" values for the vowel symbols (with some modification owing to the influence of French), was reasonably rational. It is surprisingly easy to read Chaucer correctly if you pronounce him as though he were writing in Spanish! By Shakespeare's time, this was no longer true, and in fact no-one really knew how to spell anything anymore. Elizabethans commonly wrote the same word two or three different ways on the same page, as the mood took them, apparently.
If the autographs of Shakespeare are genuine (and if he wasn't really Edward DeVere or somebody else), then he normally wrote his own name Shaxsper. He probably said it that way, too. Eek ********************************************************* 05-09-04, 02:52 PM FredPuli Yes maiku, and Latin focus, a hearth, a fireplace is not just the root of our 'fire' which we ignite ( Latin ignis, fire) and French feu. It's, naturally and obviously, the root of our word focus (which we did not have until the C17) because in a home the hearth is where everyone's gaze is directed; the focus of our attention, as well as the modern designer's 'focal point'; so the focus of a lens. Isn't that a pleasing domestic image? We thought of the Ancient Romans staring into the midst of the fire, just like us Smile.
Incidentally, in Latin, focus came to mean the home as well as the fireplace, just as our word hearth itself came to do.
Latin, like English, readily borrowed words from other languages. Greek was a favourite but local languages served too; so 'caballus' a Latinised word from some Gallic language was the soldiers' word for a nag, an normal hack or working horse, hence cavalry but the regular classical word remained for the officers' classier and regular equus, hence equine . Without that trait we would not ourselves have had two root words coming to us in that convoluted way our root words have. British soldiers did the same, taking words from Arabic ('buckshee'; the word is itself ultimately Persian) and Indian languages and turning them from soldiers' slang into regular British English :wallah ( a bloke, a man, an officious individual ) khaki (camouflage brown ) char (tea);pukka (smart, top class ) and so on.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: FredPuli, 05-09-04 03:23 PM ********************************************************* 05-09-04, 03:38 PM maiku Yes, indeed, Fred. This etymology game is funner than talk about "li'l" and "o'er," in't it?
In addition to the "equus" and the "caballus," we also have the Germanic equivalent of the Latin in the English root "horse" (OE hros, cf. MHG Ross). Of these roots, "caballus" has been the most productive, perhaps, leading by various routes to modern English words such as cavalry, chevalier, cavalier, chivalry, and cayuse, not to mention the still perhaps somewhat unassimilated "caballo," which is, of course, the Spanish form of this same root.
Your joke above about the Romans counting backwards was a very amusing one. Of course you know as well as I that they did no such thing. AUC! Big Grin
Please allow me to make one small correction of your comment about the origin of the English word "fire." This does not derive from Latin "focus," as I think you implied above. We get it from a Germanic form of the Indo-European root *pur, which is in turn cognate with words we have subsequently borrowed or coined from Greek such as "pyrotechnics," "pyromaniac," and so on.
This message has been edited. Last edited by: maiku, 05-09-04 04:17 PM ********************************************************* 05-10-04, 02:30 AM Ritzmar
quote:Originally posted by maiku: ...no such thing. AUC! Big Grin
AUC? OK, Maiku, you've got me...I give up!... Big Grin ********************************************************* 05-10-04, 04:00 AM FredPuli AUC ? Well Ab Urbe Condita is easy: it means from when Rome was li'l. And when co-founder Remus had his name pronounced 'remmus' otherwise,remus, long 'e', 'reemus', would be 'an oar'. Hey, Uncle Oar; how about that ? .
You mean the Romans cheated and waited until Christ had arrived before dating backwards? I thought it was like a countdown; you know ' "3...2...1...Bethlehem we have Unto Us " or something. Another illusion shattered. I was sure they knew the date of the First Coming and so the first Christians, in advance. They were just a bit slow in building the Colosseum to martyr them in (no Irish builders, see; had to use Roman ones so it ran decades behind schedule and it isn't even finished now, judging from the photos Frown )
Ah well, let's go back to our sheep, as the Gauls say. Or 'Finis' perhaps? Big Grin ********************************************************* 05-10-04, 05:24 AM Ritzmar Thanks, Fred! Back from walking the dog, now off to work (Maiku once described the word 'work' for the job which I do as a euphemism...it is wonder that I still pass the time of day with him, is it not?) Anyway, thanks to both of you, you always manage to make my day...Cheers!... Big Grin ********************************************************* 05-10-04, 10:28 AM
babthrower FP
" You mean the Romans cheated and waited until Christ had arrived before dating backwards? I thought it was like a countdown; you know ' "3...2...1...Bethlehem we have Unto Us " or something. Another illusion shattered. I was sure they knew the date of the First Coming and so the first Christians, in advance. They were just a bit slow in building the Colosseum to martyr them in (no Irish builders, see; had to use Roman ones so it ran decades behind schedule and it isn't even finished now, judging from the photos )"
quote:Originally posted by babthrower: FP Best post in the thread, Fread. Smile
Given your set of attitudes, Babthrower, it's easy to see why you would think so.
I agree that Fred's post is amusing, though the irony is perhaps just a li'l bit heavy-handed, wouldn't you say? No, of course you wouldn't. I withdraw the question.
We all know the Romans didn't begin counting backwards in their own history until well after the nativity of Christ. In fact, you could almost say that they never did, for by the time the Gregorian calendar was introduced they had ceased to be Romans in anything like the sense Julius or Augustus would have been much proud of.
It was not, in fact, given to Julius Caesar to know in advance of the First Coming. It was, however, revealed to one exceptional Roman, a poet and a prophet (by some accounts). It's possible that he alone, well ahead of his time, counted backwards, if none of his fellow citizens ever did, well before the journey of the Magi and all that stuff.
I refer, of course, to Vergil (or Virgil), whose Fourth Eclogue you are no doubt familiar with, Fred, in the original Latin. This poem was a clear prophecy of the dawning of the age of the Messiah. Isn't that so?
At least that's what many medieval commentators believed. You mean to tell me you don't?
To return to the topic of language change, I'd like to add to your observation, Fred, that the Latin word focus came to mean home. This is also true, interestingly enough, of one of the Spanish derivatives of this word. One of these, fuego, came to mean fire, as I said above. Another derivative, though, is the word hogar, which means home. (This kind of doublet is an interesting thing about Spanish that I've asked JR about before. Maybe he'd like to comment.)
The connection between hearth and home appears to be a natural one, then, for people to draw, perhaps as a kind of synecdoche. If you can count people by their noses, why not count homesteads by their fireplaces? (This system breaks down for the super rich, of course, who, before modern central heating systems, had fireplaces in every room of their mansions.)
That objection aside, it is revealing that the English phrase "hearth and home" must really be interpreted as an instance of hendiadys, proving that we have the same association in mind in English, too. No doubt it all goes back to some archetypal memory of our previous lives in caves, with the clan gathered around the central, or focal, firepit. ********************************************************* 05-10-04, 04:41 PM babthrower maiku says:
" quote:Originally posted by babthrower: FP Best post in the thread, Fread.
Given your set of attitudes, Babthrower, it's easy to see why you would think so.
I agree that Fred's post is amusing, though the irony is perhaps just a li'l bit heavy-handed, wouldn't you say?"
Or perhaps, to quote maiku once again, "It is (amusing), but not for the reasons you seem to think."
Ah, wurra, wurra! How would we get through our days if maiku were not forever explaining our experience to us! Cool The man/woman's rapidly becoming a legend! ********************************************************* 05-11-04, 04:31 PM FredPuli 1) 'Course the Romans counted down to the Nativity, maiku Smile. We never knew it was coming. That's why we have to use English for the bit before; B. C. (Before Christ; for the Christans) or B. C. E ( Before Christmas Eve, for the rest ). Obviously they just called it 55, then 54 then 53 and so on with no affix like B.C ; no point when everyone knew what 55, 54, 53 etc meant. Once He had been born then the Romans had to avoid confusion between, say, 4 before and 4 after; so the called 4 after Anno Domini (Latin, see ) as they'd planned to do .
2) Virgil should be Vergil because he was Publius Vergilius Maro but the English put Virgil, anyhow. It's because scholars think I is the most important letter in the alphabet; listen to them talk and I occurs more than anything; so they always put I in at the first opportunity ( I the pronoun is ego in Latin, but that's another story; or not ) even though the evidence for E in his family name runs unbroken to the 4th Century AD.
3) Medieval theologians grasped at any straw. Old P.Vergilius Maro's 4th book in the Eclogues is quite likely a dig at a man who would be Governor of Spain, if it is anything more than a fancy for a verse. People throughout history have hoped and dreamed of someone arriving to solve their problems , be he divine, semi-divine or just a newsman in a 'phone box changing into a hero . Virgil wrote the Eclogues from c39 to c37. Apart from his understanding of human hopes it's likely that Virgil and his readers were well aware of the Jews' belief. He may have pointedly lifted the idea from the Jews for the purpose of his (satirical?) story. ********************************************************* 05-12-04, 07:34 PM maiku Let the record show that the witness now denies having meant anything he said in his previous testimony. (q.v.)
Request that all of §2 following the first sentence in the above response of the witness be stricken, on the grounds that it is irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial (mildly amusing as it may be).
This message has been edited. Last edited by: maiku, 05-13-04 12:28 PM ********************************************************* 06-07-04, 02:37 AM Ritzmar It is 8.40 a.m. here, and I have just heard on Radio 4 (which I tend to listen to whilst doing this!) that there will be a talk and subsequent discussion about 'The Great Vowel Shift' on 'Start the Week' at 9.00 am. UK listeners will know that for the seven succeeding days any radio programme can be accessed via the web, so I mention this for anyone in the UK who may be interested. For my part, I shall now go and set the recorder, listen at some later date and then know more than all the rest of you about this very interesting phenomenon!... Big Grin ********************************************************* 06-07-04, 12:02 PM bedstor Here is the link for that Programme www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/starttheweek.shtml click on the Listen Again link in the yellow column for the current weeks programme or use this direct link: www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?starttheweek There is one in the 1st (blue) column but that leads to the weekly output of the station and several dozen other associated BBC radio stations Red Face ********************************************************* 06-08-04, 02:25 AM Ritzmar Cheers, Bedstor! Actually, having listened to it I would go with Maiku. His posts contain far more of interest and fact than the candy-floss which was spun on R4...(but then, what's new, eh?... Big Grin) Nota bene: Maiku is so lazy that he finds reading a book on the subject much easier than having to use his fingers to type into gogle and researching the answer that way, like everyone else...how quaintly old-fashioned... Big Grin ********************************************************* 06-09-04, 12:19 PM maiku Speaking of the Great Vowel Shift: there was this daily cartoon available in newspapers here in the U.S. some time ago called "Andy Capp." The titular character, Andy, was a brawling footballer and a pub-crawling idler from some place like Manchester or Liverpool, I forget which. He reminds me for all the world of blam.
Is this character known on your side of the pond? The relevance to the Great Vowel Shift is this: Andy keeps pigeons, and he's always on the lookout for enemies that want to do them harm. The lowest form of life in his estimation is the guy that once "tried to poison me flippin' pigeons."
It is usually thought that Andy's use of "me" in place of "my" here is a mistake in the use of case. Not so, many linguists have said: Andy's "me" is really a pre-vowel shift survival of the vowel this pronoun originally contained.
If that's right, it shows that some of you Brits still haven't decided exactly how far to carry this vowel-shift business, though it was over for the rest of us a long time ago. Wouldn't surprise me.
I also can't remember for sure whether this "me" in place of "my" is a feature of Cockney. It may be, but Andy Capp is no Cockney. He's a Mancunian or a Liverpudlian (correction: as Bedstor has recently informed me, he's a Geordie. Anyhow, I got the north of England part right, and anyways England is pretty narrow up there, isn't it?). So if you want to call people lazy, Ritz, look to the people around you, those who still lag behind several centuries of language progress. Razz
This message has been edited. Last edited by: maiku, 06-09-04 01:32 PM ********************************************************* 06-09-04, 01:21 PM bedstor Clarification for Maiku Andy Capp is a Geordie which means he lives in the Northeast of England (From the Newcastle or Sunderland areas) The Best AP member to talk about The Andy Capp way of talking would Be Cap'n Kane (sp?) Some examples of Geordie to get your mind and mouth around www.unn.ac.uk/~i105355/index3.html www.thenortheast.fsnet.co.uk/GDictionary.htm
I think I gave this link out before? www.peevish.co.uk/slang/links.htm This is a comprehensive Guide to British slang Words/sayings plus slang from elsewhere in the world some slightly adult but will keep you occupied for a long time Good Starting Place PS Andy Capp is still going strong despite his creator Reg Smythe Dying some years ago(Ghost written now) www.comics.com/creators/andycapp/ Changes regularly on this site ********************************************************* 06-09-04, 05:55 PM FredPuli 'Me' for 'my' is pretty much universal, maiku. You will find it in London, in East Anglia, in the West Country, the North East, the Midlands, the North West. I don't think of it as occurring in Scotland.It is certainly in Ireland.It is quite classless: ' I say, me old boy..' may be heard in St James' clubs. What differs is what follows it and the pronunciation and cadences overall. The Dubliner will talk of 'me hat' but the Londoners are likely to say 'me 'at'.It is not just before vowels or dropped aitches. Andy Capp, a Geordie, would have 'me pigeons' just as readily as a Brummie (Birmingham) speaker but the way they pronounced 'pigeons'would identify them straight away to any native Englishman.
Incidentally, what is Cockney ? It appears to be something which exists only in the mind of tourists and foreigners (who, for this purpose, include people from the provinces). Supposedly it was the dialect of people born within the sound of Bow bells but it came to mean that of the old East End : Whitechapel and its immediate environs. The old East End has long gone, London Docks and all. Foreigners have 'Cockney' for the whole of Greater London and, it seems, much of the South East of England.In my experience of dealing with Londoners, those who refer to themselves as Cockneys are either in the tourism business, directly or indirectly, or are humouring foreigners. My specialty was the activities of the denizens of where the descendants of the old East End had gone; places such as West Ham and Ilford (which is really Essex). Their dialect was a form of North of the Thames with intrusive Thames Estuary sounds (that most notably among those under thirty).
The London speech of the ordinary native is, at base, two dialects and not one common universal one; it's either that of the North or that of the South of the River Thames. These two have markedly different pronunciation, slang, idioms and vocabulary. This is hardly surprising when even twenty years ago there were many South Londoners who had never gone North of the River in their lives except perhaps,and very rarely, to go up West to a show (only the well-off would go there normally and the theatres in South London were more than adequate ).Foreigners include Estuary English under their umbrella called 'cockney'. This is what is spoken along the Thames Estuary, into Essex. Commentators on such matters (usually horrified elders bemoaning the death of correct English, as ever was )have noted the rapid spread of this so it now extends way beyond it's original home. ********************************************************* 06-09-04, 08:24 PM maiku Thank you both, Bedstor and Fred, for your useful and informative replies. But I still have a question. If this use of a word sounding like "me" in place of "my" is so widespread in the U.K. as you say it is, Fred (and I believe you, though it would seem to show that British linguistic laziness, or even retardation, is worse even than I thought), how is it that this use never got to this particular British colony? Such a pronunciation is unheard of here in the U.S.
Your answers, F&B, shed no real light on the question of whether this pronunciation is due to a confusion of grammatical case (as most people uncritically assume), or is a survival of a vowel sound unshifted since Chaucer in this particular pronoun. For reasons I won't bore you with here, the latter seems to be a more reasonable explanation to most linguists.
Does it matter? Of course not, but it did give me a chance to go back to the topic of the Great Vowel Shift. Smile ********************************************************* 06-10-04, 02:05 AM Ritzmar "lil" for "little"? Fred & Bed are correct in stating that the use of 'me' for 'my' is common across all classes of society here. There is no 'confusion of grammatical case'. Its use is merely laziness. 'Me' is easier and quicker to say than 'my'. For that reason I personally am astonished that its occurence is unknown in the US where, according to some of the films which I have seen recently a certain four-letter word connected to biblically going forth and multiplying seems to have achieved a universality of adjectival meaning quite breathtaking in its versatility... Big Grin ********************************************************* 06-10-04, 02:19 AM FredPuli My bet is that it is a relic, if you will, of older pronunciation. I don't think the speakers of any English dialect today never say 'my' but a good many use 'me' most of the time, particularly among themselves or when speaking quickly.
My guess is that the founders of America were from places where 'my' prevailed. People from Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, for example, say 'my' to rhyme with 'toy': 'moy'. So people originating in say Plymouth (Devon) would have been rather emphatic in saying it and not 'me'. (I was writing over hastily if I seemed to be suggesting earlier that 'me' was the regular pronunciation of 'my' in the West Country. It may be found in some places and with some individuals, but not overall; quite the opposite in fact)
You may have heard English actors or even American 'classical' actors talking 'mummerset' a dialect on the stage (from 'mummer' and Somerset, the county ). It is for playing all English rustics. The play may be set anywhere but mummerset is the default accent for any yokel character. It is based on West Country rural accents (hence Somerset). 'Moy' for 'my' and 'Oi' for 'I ' are notable features of it. I suspect that Shakespeare rendered a country accent in one of his plays, just as he did for Welsh (Fluellen in Henry V )in which case he's to blame. Perhaps his Warwickshire locals spoke like that too but it seems more likely that he would choose an accent that sounded comically rustic to them, not copy or mock their own, local, one.
Some early American settlers came from the Eastern side of England too, if placenames are a clue. Boston is in Lincolnshire, so is just to the North of East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk )Cambridge is to the Western edge of East Anglia. Cambridgeshire, South of Lincolnshire, has a 'moy' or 'my' though in East Anglia proper it's more 'me'for my.Lincolnshire I can't place on this. However ,the old US and British Open champion golfer, Tony Jacklin, was born, raised and lived mostly in in Lincolnshire.He is definitely a 'my'. His accent sounds slightly 'Northern' too but whether it represents all Lincolnshire I know not; Lincolnshire stretches to the Yorkshire borders.( Southerners talk of 'Northern' just as the rest talk of Cockney and most do not distinguish between Yorkshire and Lancashire accents; it's all 'oop North' )
So we may need some research into the earliest settlers of America to answer this. Accents do evolve though, in quite a short time; there has to be some reason why natives of Texas don't sound like those of Maine or Washington State; obviously it could just be that 'me' for 'my' simply died out among the descendants of those who used it. ********************************************************* 06-10-04, 02:20 AM Ritzmar PS Bedstor, this link which you give, whilst very amusing to me will probably be meaningless to our American cousins! I worked for many years in that neck of the woods, and I can follow the sounds perfectly; but to 'untrained' ears the examples must be largely incomprehensible...am I right...can ye canny Yanks 'eer me'cross t'watter? ********************************************************* 06-10-04, 02:23 AM Ritzmar Sorry, Fred, we appear to have posted at the same time! My PS is a long way behind your latest, much more informative post, which I wil now re-read properly... Big Grin ********************************************************* 06-10-04, 02:25 AM Jenny Roberts Referring back to 'me for my'. I don't think it's just laziness Ritz. At the school where I work it's part of the kid's everyday language. They honestly think that it is correct to say 'Me Mam sez to tell yer that I couldn't do me homework becoz I didn't ave a pen', etc. They say 'I were' instead of I was and 'I never' instead of I didn't . There are lots more too! It's a kind of local dialect that's passed down in families. If you listen to me speaking, I probably do it as well! ********************************************************* 06-10-04, 02:36 AM Ritzmar You, Jen?? I thought you took tiffin with the Nawab of Pataudi on a regular basis...? I never knew that you were one of us... Eek ********************************************************* 06-10-04, 06:57 AM FredPuli maiku, please come back and tell us about 'were' for 'was'. Is this some relic of an earlier form ?If so then it's a Northern relic. 'I were there, we were both there, and he were there '
In the South East they avoid such a strange error. There the equivalent lad says 'I was there, we was both there, and he was there', which is much better Wink.
[Hang on, is Cheshire Northern? It's a bit like saying Monaco is in France the Vatican City is part of Italy or Frinton-on-Sea is part of Essex (or indeed has reached World War I yet :'I say Edith, look ! Great news: Mafeking has been relieved ! ' ). They are in it but not of it, mostly Big Grin I suppose it must be Northern if they have local kids using 'were' like that (or do they import them from Birkenhead, which was originally in Cheshire ?)] ********************************************************* 06-10-04, 09:39 AM bedstor
quote:Originally posted by Ritzmar: am I right...can ye canny Yanks 'eer me'cross t'watter?
I concur If you and I wrote like we speak I don't think any one outside the UK would Understand Us Confused
Historical Odddity trivia for the US members: The Pilgrim Fathers sailed from Plymouth in Devon Now I have a friend who hails from there and he is hard to understand sometimes with his dialect /Cornish is similarRoll Eyes Imagine an America speaking with a Devonshire accent Confused(I have spotted 1 or 2 Words from the area in General speech in N.America) such as Bought which has an A sound in the US also Devon..But an O sound elsewhere Roll Eyes ********************************************************* 06-10-04, 03:47 PM maiku Sorry, Fred, I can't tell you anything useful about the distribution of "I were" in English dialects. It is rare in the U.S., but I've heard it now and then, though never in what you could call cultivated speech. (I'm talking about the indicative form of the verb here, of course, not the so-called subjunctive form. Clauses like "If I were king" still occur, but these are getting increasingly rare, too).
I can tell you that at no time in the history of English was this "I were" ever considered "standard." It is not documented anywhere, as far as I know, before the late Eighteenth Century (which lends a little additional credence, perhaps, to the entirely conjectural explanation of its origin I'll offer now.)
As you probably know, "you was" was at one time, until the late Eighteenth Century, at least, common in the usage of educated speakers. Boswell used it, and he attributes it to none other than Samuel Johnson in his London Journal. In the second edition of his Life of Johnson, all such uses were edited to "you were." So by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, "you was" became stigmatized. I conjecture that among certain speakers the paradigm "I was," "you were" was leveled in favor of "were" for both persons. Such leveling of distinct forms is very common anyway, but might well have been encouraged here by what amounts to a hyperurbanism, or hyper-correction.
It's sort of like the "between you and I" business you hear so often these days, at least in this country. Generations of American schoolchildren were so savagely scolded and deeply humiliated by schoolmarms for saying things like "John and me went to the show last night," that they wound up never using anything but the pronoun "I" inside conjunctions ever again. So they got "John and I went to the show last night" right, finally, but started in saying things like, "This secret is strictly between Mary and I." And thought grammar was a subject for pompous, censorious old windbags. Frown
This message has been edited. Last edited by: maiku, 06-10-04 09:11 PM
This message has been edited. Last edited by: DorianGreyed,
some slightly adult 
but will keep you occupied for a long time 
