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Incidentally the bread winner was the
hlaf weard
or
bread warden but in the 14th century we stopped
pronouncing the
f
and we’d already dropped the
h
so it sounded more like
lahrd
which led to laird and
lord. If you search for The Lord’s Prayer in Old
English from the 11th Century on YouTube you can
hear the
hlaf
word spoken. Do try and listen to it for
here is the sound of our ancestors as it would have
sounded even as early as the 7th century. Melvyn
Bragg used the example of the modern Friesian
language from the north Netherlands on the North Sea
Coast, where the black and white cows come from, as
the closest sounding language to the English used
1500 years ago to take us back to our sound roots.
You can also track down spoken versions of epic
poems like
Beowulf
which contains many examples
of figures of speech known as kennings from the Old
Icelandic verb kenna to know – a verb that survives
of course in Scotland as in do you ken? In
Beowulf
kennings include earth walkers for travellers, whale
way for sea, wave steed for boat and bone house for
the human body. Women, don’t you know, are called
peace-weavers, they’ve always known that then, men.
Always ignored it!
What!
At the bottom of my street, round the back of the big
Tesco and in the shadow of the Evening Standard
plant is a
pound plus
warehouse that calls itself
What!
The exclamation mark has caused great
merriment in my circle and it is generally said very
loudly and accusingly as in
Where did you get that
weird looking lamp? I got it at WHAT!!!!
In fact
what
is one of our very earliest exclamations
going right back to the 10
th
century when it was
Hwæt!
and it was the word used by the bard or poet
in the mead hall to summon the attention of the
crowd.
æ
sounded like the short
a
in hat and the
h
was that little puff of air that has only disappeared
from the English language in the past 50 years or so.
I don’t know if you ever sat in front of
Torchy
the Battery Boy
, your young self or with your own
children but they said the
h
in that programme in their
whats and wheres. Later
what
came to be used as a
greeting, a form that more or less died out with
Jeeves & Wooster’s
What oh!
I note with interest
that although it’s become sport to decry the young
their corrupted text spelling during World War Two
it became common to see what spelled as Wot as in
Wot! No eggs? usually in conjunction with the
Chad cartoon, the long nosed man with the little head
peering over the wall. Pot, Kettle and all that -
Old English/French and Latin words respectively.
Early Old English was not so much a language as a
group of related dialects brought to southern Britain
by Germanic invaders from the continental home-
lands during the fifth and sixth centuries AD.
Differences already existed between the dialects of
the various tribes involved in the invasions, including
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and further divisions may
have evolved within the separate kingdoms formed
under tribal leaders. Four main dialects of Old
English developed reflecting the Anglo-Saxon
Heptarchy: Northumbrian in the North, Mercian in