{"id":25142,"date":"2020-08-29T21:38:49","date_gmt":"2020-08-29T20:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/?p=25142"},"modified":"2020-08-29T21:38:49","modified_gmt":"2020-08-29T20:38:49","slug":"a-coin-from-the-days-when-english-was-a-tribal-language-ill-adapted-to-roman-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/2020\/08\/29\/a-coin-from-the-days-when-english-was-a-tribal-language-ill-adapted-to-roman-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"A coin from the days when English was a tribal language, ill-adapted to Roman letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every so often there is a news story about the difficulty of representing some foreign language in Roman letters.\u00a0 This is especially the case for languages like Chinese which already have a\u00a0 dedicated script.<\/p>\n

Every script or alphabet exists for the purpose of representing the sounds of a language.\u00a0\u00a0At those times when a language has never been written before, the new script will often be adapted from some existing letters.\u00a0 Sometimes it takes a couple of attempts.\u00a0 We are all familiar with the creation of the Cyrillic script by Cyril and Methodius, from Greek.<\/p>\n

The truth is that Roman letters may be the standard today, but the Roman script was never devised to represent most of the languages that are today written in it.<\/p>\n

Bible translators very often create the first written version of some tribal language.\u00a0 Consequently they struggle with issues such as sounds that do not match any letter.\u00a0 They end up creating clumps of letters, or using accents or something, in order to cope.<\/p>\n

But few of us may have considered that the missionaries to the Anglo-Saxons had to deal with exactly the same problem.<\/p>\n

English is not a language which was originally written in Roman script.\u00a0 It was originally written in runes, which were devised to represent the sounds of the English language.\u00a0 (We are all familiar with the appearance of English runes thanks to J.R.R.Tolkien.)<\/p>\n

English spelling is as weird as it is for several reasons, but one of the reasons is that the English language contains sounds not found in Latin.\u00a0 One example is the “th” sound, found in “the”.<\/p>\n

In runic, “th” was represented by a single character, “thorn”, written as “\u00fe”.\u00a0 Indeed if you visit Iceland, as I have done, you will see this rune still in use, mingled into Roman script.\u00a0 The thorn rune was often written with the loop open at the top, looking more like “y”.\u00a0 This is the origin of such modern curiosities as “ye olde tea shoppe” – the “ye” was originally “\u00fee”.<\/p>\n

Few will be aware that there is numismatic evidence of the changeover from runes to Roman.\u00a0 I owe my knowledge of this to Dr Kate Wiles, who posted a coin and a fascinating explanation to twitter here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a>
Coin of Offa, issued by moneyer Ecghun. East Anglian mint.\u00a0 785-793 AD. Type 168.\u00a0 See here<\/a>.\u00a0 Said to be found near Great Saxham, Suffolk, 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This is a coin issued by King Offa in the 8th century, produced by the moneyer Ecghun. You can see on the left it says REX \u16ed OFFA.<\/p>\n

On the right is the moneyer\u2019s name, written EXCHVN. Which seems like an odd spelling.<\/p>\n

It was made at a time when English was only just starting to be written with the Latin alphabet – previously, it had been written using runes. Latin and Old English didn\u2019t have all the same sounds, though, so there were teething problems when working out how to spell some words.<\/p>\n

Latin, for example, didn\u2019t have the \u2018dg\u2019 sound we have in words like \u2018edge\u2019, so there was no obvious letter that English could use. The end solution in Old English was to use \u2018cg\u2019, but that took a while to settle.<\/p>\n

Ecghun\u2019s solution in the meantime was to import a rune to do the job – \u16b7 is the runic character for G.<\/p>\n

So this tiny coin is evidence of the earliest stages of English starting to be written with this alphabet. It\u2019s a combination of two languages and two writing systems.[ref]Dr Wiles gives as a source Martin Findell & Philip Shaw, “Language Contact in Early Medieval Britain: Settlement, Interaction, and Acculturation”, in: W.M. Ormrod &c, Migrants in Medieval England<\/em>, c.500-c.1500<\/em>, Oxford (2020).[\/ref]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It’s a fascinating story which doesn’t deserve to be lost in Twitter.\u00a0 It certainly makes you look at English spelling a second time!\u00a0 Thank you, Dr. Wiles, for drawing our attention to it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every so often there is a news story about the difficulty of representing some foreign language in Roman letters.\u00a0 This is especially the case for languages like Chinese which already have a\u00a0 dedicated script. Every script or alphabet exists for the purpose of representing the sounds of a language.\u00a0\u00a0At those times when a language has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19],"tags":[1459],"class_list":["post-25142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-my-diary-announcements","tag-runes"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/roger-pearse.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}