“Yea, forsooth,” replied the bond-servant, staring with wide-open eyes at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he had never before seen. “Yea, his honorable worship is within. But he hath a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see his worship now.” [1]This professor — who shall remain nameless; and he no longer teaches at my alma mater; he has moved on to another school in another state — this professor read yea (/jeı/) as yeah (/jɛə/). I’m sure he knew what the word meant, but he pronounced it incorrectly. He pronounced ye correctly, but that was small consolation to the ghost of Hawthorne, I’m sure. He (and others I’ve known) constantly confused the two words. And vice versa. In colloquial use, I see yeah misspelled yea all the time. It drives me absolutely nuts.
Can you imagine this? “Yeah, forsooth.” I would just about tear out my hair every time I heard it. He might as well have added, “dude.” This guy was a well-educated American college professor and a native speaker of English! The two words, yea and yeah, mean basically the same thing — yes — but there is a world of difference between them, starting with the pronunciation. I ask you, would it sound right to declaim, “Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death […]”?
Or how about “Yay! Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, tra la la”? Maddening! The same confusion occurs with yay, the exclamation of delight, which I often see spelled yea. This is at least pronounced the same as yea, and at one time, its meaning may have been the same, but again, there is a world of difference now. I can understand the confusion to some degree. After all, the antonym of yea is not *nea, but nay. And all three, yea, yeah, and yay, may derive from the same source, Old English géa “yes”, but there is a reason we have three distinct forms today. I wish people would distinguish them appropriately.
I threw ye in for good measure (and because it occurs near yea in the Hawthorne quotation). This has two meanings: “you” and “the” — the latter, as in Ye Olde Fishe and Chippe Shoppe, comes from the loss of the thorn (þ) in the English alphabet and is really a corruption. No sign of affirmation in either of these words, and fortunately, I’ve seen fewer people confuse them.
Now hear ye: is anyone out there still unclear on the difference between these words, yea or nay? Nay? Yay! ;)
[1] Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1878, pp. 129–30.
Argh. If « yay » is to be pronounced /jeı/, then a small part of my world crumbles: I always said it /jaı/. But then, I always said /neı/, which means that crumbling part was not that logical anyway...
ReplyDeleteThanks for the clarification. :)
Meneldur, I’m glad to help set anybody straight that I can — I just hope I don’t come across as too condescending. I don’t mean to, despite all my talk of pet peeves of tearing my hair out. Anyway, a part of me can understand the temptation to pronounce yay /jaı/, by analogy with aye (/aı/), yet another word indicating affirmation. :)
ReplyDeleteEarly Modern English distinguished sharply between yes/no and yea/nay, the first being used only to answer questions negative in form. Sir Thomas More famously flamed William Tyndale, the first English Bible translator, for failing to observe this distinction; apparently, it was just beginning to break down in the 1520s. (More actually misstated the rule, thus providing an early example of Hartman's Law.)
ReplyDelete'Ye', as in 'ye olde', wasn't pronounced /ji/ by people who knew what a thorn was, was it?
ReplyDeleteNay, Robert. Thou hast the right of it.
ReplyDeleteI can just picture you grinding your teeth as that professor mispronounced "yea"! Egads.
ReplyDeleteThat's this interesting post!
Robert, Sue is right; it was pronounced as if still written with a þ; y was just an allograph of þ. Sometimes the y was written with a dot over it to distinguish it from the semivowel y.
ReplyDeleteI haven’t read a good explanation for why y, though. The th digraph representing the same sound as þ goes all the way back to the early Old English period. It was the original orthographic replacement for the runic forerunners of þ/ð. By the late 8th century, the runic alphabet was no longer considered a pagan threat to Christianity, and the original runes were adapted back into the orthography for those sounds not normally found in Latin. The digraph is also common in some of the dialects of OE as well as in the Germanic languages of the continent. Why th wouldn’t have been used instead of y is something I don’t know. Perhaps in the days before printing, it would have been easy to “forget” the original digraph? John, do you anything more about how the y allograph came about?
But the point today is that ye has been pronounced /ji/ for a long time now, which contributes to the confusion.
Thanks, Robert, Sue, and Cat for chiming in. :)
And I think I’m going to read up a bit on the þ/y development; see if I can learn more about the prevailing theories for it. An interesting topic; just one I’ve never delved into before now. Thanks for the prompting, Robert!
ReplyDeleteI have always believed that the y was chosen to stand in for thorn WHEN printing came in - is yat too simple? I've believed yat for so long yat I know not where I heard it..............
ReplyDeleteSue, I have heard that too, but I am not convinced. In the early days of movable type, each letter shape had to be produced by hand before it could be used in printing. So, if you didn’t have a thorn but needed one, why not make one? Not doing so would be mere laziness — but of course, plenty of other failures and work-arounds have been explained by laziness, so it’s possible! :)
ReplyDelete(Maybe it wasn’t laziness. I guess it’s possible the cost in labor and material to produce thorns, relative to their frequency in the texts being printed, might have been too high. Still, kind of lame, isn’t it? :)
ReplyDeleteBe delighted if you can find out anything more definite, but it is a complex shape - bar-d, or 'eth' disappeared around the same time, did it not? And - was it called aesc - the diphthong ae? All fiddly to cast, and yes, the line of least resistance is seldom resisted!
ReplyDeleteYes, eth disappeared around the same time, usually replaced just by d. Of course, with the invention of typewriters, one could — and I certainly did this — type a thorn by striking the p, then backspacing and striking the b. For eth, you struck the d, backspaced, then typed a hyphen. For aesc (which is not a diphthong, if I’m niggling), you could carefully execute a half-backspace, then add the e. In movable type, the aesc remained viable in a way that thorn and eth did not, because the ligature of a + e was extremely common in typesetting Latin (and this was a diphthong).
ReplyDeleteYou might find this article on the history of typing Old English interesting.
Thanks for the article! And please to further clarify diphthongs for me.
ReplyDeleteA diphthong is a glide made between two distinct vowel sounds in the space of a single syllable. Example: the first-person personal pronoun, “I”. In most of the English and American accents, this is a classic diphthong, sliding smoothly from /a/ (or a similar vowel) to /i/.
ReplyDeleteA brief digression. One hallmark of Southern American English is the monophthongization of diphthongs; i.e., what is normally pronounced as a glide between two vowels is instead pronounced as a single vowel. In the case of “I”, it sounds like /æ/ or /ä/.
So, back to our starting point, in Latin, ae is pronounced like the English pronoun, “I”, but in Old English, æ is pronounced like the vowel in English “cat”.
O-Kay - ae think! Not at all what I'd been vaguely thinking, so good job I asked. I wonder if you might, in your apparently endless store of wisdom re: language, have some knowledge that would allow you to suggest a handy way to spell a familar term of address in Devonshire English - still alive, just, although more common in my distant youth. When greeting a male friend/mate/buddy, one says 'Right, boy?' IE 'are you OK mate?' What I can't represent in letters is the pronounciation of 'boy', which is clipped very short and is represented by some authors (e.g. Eden Philpotts) as 'by' - but that isn't right because the O lingers like a ghost. Could it be 'buy' - mmmm. It's more like 'biy' to me. (But not 'bi'). Now I know you may never have heard this but can you suggest some way of representing it just with the alphabet? Maybe I should record it! Maybe one of those places in the US where they make pasties still has the sound?
ReplyDeleteHmm. Without hearing it, it would be very hard to say. I’m not personally familiar with the accent around Devon, so I can’t even make a very good guess. Can you find any audio or video that might help? Your hint of “buy” makes me wonder, is the pronunciation similar to Irish English? Maybe /bɐı/? But that’s nothing more than a total guess at this point.
ReplyDeleteQuoth Angus McIntosh, M. L. Samuels, and Michael Benskin, eds, A linguistic atlas of late mediaeval English. Volume 4: County dictionary. Aberdeen; New York: Aberdeen University Press (1986) in section 6.5:
ReplyDelete"For reasons connected with the development of handwriting in the late 12th and 13th centuries, the letters ‘þ’ and ‘y’ came to be written identically in some modes of script. By the later Middle Ages, insular practice was regionally coherent: south of a line running roughly from the Mersey to the Wash, but excluding much of East Anglia, ‘þ’ and ‘y’ were represented by the same (usually y-like) symbol."
I found this quotation in section 3.1.6 of the wonderful paper "On the status of the LATIN LETTER ÞORN and of its sorting order" by Michael Everson and Baldur Sigurðsson, well worth reading for anyone interested in þ. See also generally Michael's blog þorn.info, which also discusses edh, yogh, and wynn.
An excellent addendum to the conversation. Thanks, John. I will definitely be making some time to read the essay to which you linked — and probably that whole blog too. Right up my street.
ReplyDeleteInteresting idea about Irish but I think in Devon/Cornwall we have stronger links with Wales/Brittany. It is a little foolish to expect you to 'hear it in your head'! However, I recall that many writers attempting to spell Irish vernacular 'boyo' try differing spellings; I've seen bhoyo, bhuoyo for certain. There must be some elusive sound we can't get down on paper. I try to hear myself and I am apparently saying buy-ee, but all short and swallowed (not a very scientific description). If I ever find a sound-clip I'll ask you again, Jason. Meanwhile where could I learn more about phonetic devices like that upside-down a you used above?
ReplyDeleteJohn, great article thanks!
I’d say a good (and easier) place to start would be to read the Wikipedia articles “Phonology”, “International Phonetic Alphabet”, and “Vowel”. Follow any of the links to other, more specialized articles, if you like. If you get through all that and still want more, just ask, and I can recommend some books on the subject.
ReplyDeleteNo, I should be fine with Wiki - I just needed to recall the phrase 'International Phonetic Alphabet' ! It's always intrigued me and now I am retired I can at least find time to look it up. Thanks yet again Jason.
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure!
ReplyDeleteAn account of the letters thorn and 'y', and of the origins in English of "th" as a replacement for thorn, will be found in "Journal of the Society of Archivists" vol. 7 (April 1982) pp. 13-30; cf. vol. 5 of the same journal, pp. 506-7, footnote 9. There is - or should be - no mystery about any of this.
ReplyDeleteNo mystery? That a good deal more certainty than I usually feel comfortable showing! I’ll see whether I can track down a copy of the mystery-dispelling essay to which you refer.
ReplyDelete