The Scotch forbye (præter) here appears as forrþbi; so forthward became forward.
Orrmin often writes uppo for upon. This is one of the Derbyshire peculiarities, which have lately been brought home to all lovers of good English by the authoress of Adam Bede. The old uppe preceded the more modern uppan.
Most striking is the number of Orrmin's words beginning with the privative un. We have lost many of them, and have thus sadly weakened our diction; but our best writers are awaking to a sense of our loss, and such words as unwisdom are coming in once more.
The privative or, as orraþ is still found in the Ormulum, but did not last much longer.
The old hwœt litles, which lingered on elsewhere, is here changed into summwhatt, which we have kept: there is a change in the consonants, if we compare the old hwœt with the new what;[1] we also find sum oþerr and summwhœr.
Orrmin employs that for the Latin ille, a sense unknown before the Conquest; while London stuck to the old thilk for two hundred and fifty years longer.
Vol. I. p. 227. Whase itt iss þatt lufeþþ griþþ, þatt mann shall findenn Jesu Crist.
For the Plural of this þatt he employs þa (fifty years later this þa was to become þas).
- ↑ If we had kept the h in its proper place, at the beginning of the word, we should have full in our view the link between hwœt and the Latin cwid (quid). The interchange between h and c has not yet died out in our island. I have heard Scotch peasants talk of a cwirlwind instead of a hwirlwind.
