Owing to the changes of letters in different shires, we sometimes have two words where our forefathers had but one, each word with its own shade of meaning. ‘To drag a man out’ is different from the phrase ‘to draw a man out:’ the hard North is here opposed to the softer South West. Moreover, we may speak of a dray horse. Our Standard English is much the richer from having sprung up in shires widely apart.
We have also followed Suffolk in our word for the Latin osculari. A glance at Stratmann's dictionary will show that in the South East of England this was written kesse, in the South West it was cusse, but in East Anglia and farther to the North it was kiss. The same may be remarked as to kin, hill, listen, ridge, and many other words. The Old English o was now getting the modern sound of u, as in the Proverbs of Alfred; we find booc, mood, and wulde, instead of boc, mod, and wolde.[1]
What Orrmin called þatt an and patt oþer is seen in the Genesis and Exodus in a new guise.
Two likenesses . . . he
Gaf hire ðe ton. — Page 77.
Ðis on wulde don ðe toðer wrong. — Page 78.
We see other new forms of old words in cude (potui), eilond (insula), fier (ignis), frigt, hol (sanus), loth, quuen
- ↑ Rather further to the North, as we shall see, the old o was turned into ou. A foreigner may well despair of pronouncing English vowels, when he finds that the words rune, wound, and mood are all sounded in the same way. This comes from Standard English being the product of many different shires.
