Other English words, common in our mouths, are found in their new form in the Havelok for the first time, such as yonder, thoruthlike: overthwart has been pared down to athwart since that age.
The French use vous, when addressing the Almighty. This took root in England; and we find of you, a word unmusical in Quaker's ear, employed for the Latin tuus:
‘For the holi milce of you
mercy
Have merci of me, louerd, nou!’ — Line 1361.
lord
I give the earliest instance of a well-known vulgarism:
‘Hwan Godard herds þat þer þrette.’ — 2404.
In substantives, we find the Plural shon (our shoon), one of the few corrupt Plurals in n that we keep, and which will never die out, thanks to a famous old ballad in Hamlet. What Orrmin called laf (panis) is now seen as lôf: we have not changed the sound of this word in the last six hundred years.
The Old English cwiðe is now seen as quiste (our bequest).
We see two lines in page 55 which explain why the Irish to this day sound the r so strongly:
‘And he haves on þoru his arum (arm),
Þerof is ful mikel harum (harm).’
So the Irish sound the English boren (natus) in the true old way. We see the Old English word for a well-known bird, in line 1241:
‘Ne þe hende, ne þe drake.’
