January 16th - Olde Words
Olde Words
Back in Olde England before the Normans came, before the major Viking invasions, there were a buncha Saxon and Angle kings in wooden halls listening to minstrels tell stories by lyre, high as hell on paganism, but often marrying christian ladies for strategic alliances. Rome had already conquered and then abandoned England, and although some Latin influence on vocabulary existed (mostly due to a monastic vein across the British Isles), Olde English was yet a Germanic language.
Epic poems in the oral tradition still reigned supreme as the main means of telling tales and spreading news of the big events, and the minstrels were the adepts at word manipulation. Olde English poetry revolves around alliteration, so to meet that requirement in the comparatively tiny language of Olde English, poets had to create compound words that fit that poetic form. This was already common practice when naming new things, as can be seen by the word "garlic." Leek is an Olde English word for onion. Gar is Olde English for spear. Put em together and we have Gar-Leek or Garlic, literally Spear Onion.
Again, instead of rhyming for memorization, the Germanic poets used fore-stressed alliterative verse. Each line of a poem was divided into two separate halves. The sound at the beginning of the second half had to have a corresponding sound to the first stressed syllable in the first line. To give an illustration of this type of poetry, we can convert the popular poem "Jack and Jill."
The first line is "Jack and Jill (first half), went up a hill. (second half)" To rewrite that in Olde English we can change the word "went" to "jogged" to fit the alliteration so that we then have a proper Olde English line that reads, "Jack and Jill jogged up the hill." And to continue that theme, "to gather a gallon of water." The reason for the alliterative poem vs a rhyming one is that Germanic grammar inhibited rhyme style because the ending of words depended on whether the word was subject or object of a sentence; to change the ending of a word would change the meaning of a line/sentence.
Because of this alliterative wordplay and the relative lack of available words, Anglo-Saxons had to invent many words, creating compound words to fit the alliterative verse. They were mostly sea-faring peoples and many of their epic poems related to the sea and ships. The poets created euphemisms and stock-phrases to pull out of their hats when they needed to fit the alliteration while performing, and so created compounds for ships such as wave-floater, water-wood, sea-horse, sea-goer and more. By the time the Normans conquered England and we start to see Latin influence Middle English, the same technique was used to begin creating the now massive English vocabulary. The word "via" comes from the Latin by way of an original Indo-European word and means "by way of". "Con" means together, so we get “convey.” "Ob" means against, so we get “obvious.” We also get "voyage" from "via" by its adulteration via the French tongue. "En" means on, so we get envoy. "Da" means off, so we get devious, deviate, and deviant. "Pre" means before, so we get previous. And more, but I'm tired of writing this. The point is to demonstrate the evolution of the English language as the juggernaut of vocabulary and why.
That’s pretty neat.