South for two hundred and fifty years after his time; he makes no distinction between Definite and Indefinite Adjectives, and their Plurals do not end in es. Writing, as he does, not far from the spot where the Northumbrian Psalter is thought to have been translated, he has a strong dislike to compound vowels. He often writes brest, callf, cnew, darr, dep, ledd, fihhtenn, frend, lernenn, instead of the old breost, cealf, cneow, dear, deop, lœd, feohtan, freond, leornigan. In the pronunciation of these words, as in many other things, we have followed him. By this time, the new sound ch had made its way from the South up to the Trent; we find bennche, lœche, macche, spœche, instead of the old benc, l’œce, maca, spœce.[1] Orrmin was the second English writer, so far as is known, who pretty regularly used sh instead of the former sc; he wrote shœfess, shœþe, shœwenn, shall, and shame: this change began in the South, and the older form had not altogether gone out in the North, for he uses both biskop and bishop. Nowhere more clearly than in the Ormulum can we see the struggle between the Old and the New. He continues the custom of softening g into y; eage with him is eʓhe, not far from our eye; geong becomes ʓung. We have happily not followed him in softening the g in words like give, get, and gate; or in corrupting deor (in Latin, ferœ) into deoress, deers. He was the first to place ʓ at the end of a word, after a vowel; as þeʓʓ (they). He gave us lay instead of the Peterborough lai. Orrmin, being a true Northerner,
- ↑ Our tongue is much enriched by having different forms of the same word; such as dike, ditch, shriek, screech, drink, drench, egg, edge, &c., owing to this intrusive ch.
