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olorielThe knot burst. I know how the story goes on. It came to me during class, triggered by the word éaldhláfordcynn. I have no idea why that happened. My story has hardly anything to do with 'kin of ancient lords'. At any rate not enough to justify that triggering. Still, there it came. WTF, brain.
Especially since this is actually a Middle English seminar and that lone Old English word didn't even belong there.
I love my Middle English seminar, although it does weird things to my brain. But now English actually begins to make sense. I hadn't expected that to ever happen.
And I love how you can trace words back, and know why this or that word changed, this or that consonant was dropped or this or that vowel turned into another. For example, did you know why it is 'five' with an /ai/ sound, but 'fifteen' with an /i/ sound? Both comes from the same word, of course (namely Common Germanic fynf, which is, of course, also the ancestor of Modern German 'fünf').
In Old English, the vowel was unrounded from y to i, and, as often happened, the 'n' was dropped. (The same thing happened with gans, which ended up as 'goose' in English. It's still 'Gans' in German.) To make up for the dropped consonent, the vowel was lengthened - now we have fi:f instead of fynf. You still following? ;)
Fifteen would be fi:f-te:n, but the consonent cluster results in a shortening of the vowel. fi:f and fiften are still close enough, though.
And now comes the wonderful Great Vowel Shift that makes all long vowels wander one upwards. i: is already as far up as you can go, so it gets diphthongized, resulting, finally, in fife. The diphthong, over time, calls for a voiced following consonant, so the f turns into v. And there we have our 'five'.
In fiften, only the long 'e' is affected by the GVS; it becomes i:. The i, however, is short and uninteresting.
And thus the 5, although being the same in both words, is /faiv/ in one and /fif/ in the other.
... yeah, I know. I'm probably the only person whom that sort of thing sends into mad glee.
... also, that habit of consonant-dropping and vowel-lengthening led to the revelation that the name of one of my MCs, little Málor, might as well be an Old-Englishization of Maglor. Tehee.
And now to write, before the inspiration goes away again.
Especially since this is actually a Middle English seminar and that lone Old English word didn't even belong there.
I love my Middle English seminar, although it does weird things to my brain. But now English actually begins to make sense. I hadn't expected that to ever happen.
And I love how you can trace words back, and know why this or that word changed, this or that consonant was dropped or this or that vowel turned into another. For example, did you know why it is 'five' with an /ai/ sound, but 'fifteen' with an /i/ sound? Both comes from the same word, of course (namely Common Germanic fynf, which is, of course, also the ancestor of Modern German 'fünf').
In Old English, the vowel was unrounded from y to i, and, as often happened, the 'n' was dropped. (The same thing happened with gans, which ended up as 'goose' in English. It's still 'Gans' in German.) To make up for the dropped consonent, the vowel was lengthened - now we have fi:f instead of fynf. You still following? ;)
Fifteen would be fi:f-te:n, but the consonent cluster results in a shortening of the vowel. fi:f and fiften are still close enough, though.
And now comes the wonderful Great Vowel Shift that makes all long vowels wander one upwards. i: is already as far up as you can go, so it gets diphthongized, resulting, finally, in fife. The diphthong, over time, calls for a voiced following consonant, so the f turns into v. And there we have our 'five'.
In fiften, only the long 'e' is affected by the GVS; it becomes i:. The i, however, is short and uninteresting.
And thus the 5, although being the same in both words, is /faiv/ in one and /fif/ in the other.
... yeah, I know. I'm probably the only person whom that sort of thing sends into mad glee.
... also, that habit of consonant-dropping and vowel-lengthening led to the revelation that the name of one of my MCs, little Málor, might as well be an Old-Englishization of Maglor. Tehee.
And now to write, before the inspiration goes away again.
