words with the letter p; few such are found in Orrmin, and nearly all of them are Church Latin phrases.
He uses waʓʓn instead of the old wœgen, and we still employ both wain and waggon; both alike are found in English writers before the Norman Conquest.
Weddlac (wedlock) now appears, where of old wiflác would have been used. The former word, before Orrmin's time, meant no more than the Latin pignus.
The Old English woruld stood for sœculum, and nothing more; but it now begins to stand for orbis.[1]
In Orrmin's werrkedaʓh, the new form of weorc-dœg, we see the first germ of Shakespere's ‘this work-a-day world.’
Orrmin sometimes casts a letter out of the middle of a word; thus he has both the old wurrþshipe and the new wurrshipe, worship.
The word daffte still keeps its old sense, humilis; it has been degraded, like silly (beatus).
Adjectives were losing the guttural, with which they formerly ended. We find in Orrmin both erþlic and erþliʓ.
Follhsumm (compliant) has not yet the degrading sense of our fulsome; indeed, the latter is said to be connected with foul. Fresh now replaces the older fersc.
The word fus, ‘eager,’ is here found in its true old sense. This is now degraded, like many another good word. The worthy Nicodemus, as Orrmin says, was
- ↑ This word is still rightly pronounced as a dissyllable in Scotland;
so in Lady Nairne's Mitherless Lammie: —
‘But it wad gae witless the warald to see.’
