fus to lernenn; in our days, a tiresome old woman is fussy.
Nacod now becomes nakedd (nudus).
Orrmin uses sheepish in a sense far removed from ours; he applies the adjective (I. p. 230) to a man who meekly follows Christ's pattern.
We find þurrhutlike, thoroughly, for the first time. Ungelic is now cut down to unnlic (unlike).
We see œþeliʓ, our easily, instead of the older eaðelice.
For the Latin sunt, we find arrn, as well as beon and sinndenn. The first of these was hardly ever used in the South or West of England; it comes from the Angles, as we saw in the Northumbrian Gospels. Hi wœron now sometimes, as in the Southern Homilies, becomes þeʓʓ wœre; but a more wonderful change is þu wœre turned into þu wass, the Norse war (eras); ic sceal becomes I shall. We see the last of the Old English si (in Latin, sit); it survives, somewhat clipped, in our yes, i.e. ge si. Beô is in the Ormulum cut down to be, and beon (esse) to ben. Orrmin uses the old ic mót, þu móst, and also a new Scandinavian auxiliary verb, which is employed even now from Caithness to Derbyshire.[1] Such a phrase as I mun do this is first found in his work; the mun is the Scandinavian muna, but mune in the Ormulum implies futurity more than necessity.
Orrmin uses assken (rogare) instead of the Southern acsian, and we have followed him; the Irish still use axe, since the first English colonists came from Bristol and the South.
- ↑ Four years ago I heard an old Derbyshire gamekeeper use the verb in question.
