Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter Kirk <peter AT qaya.org>]

On 10/02/2006 08:19, Rochelle Altman wrote:
> ...
> No; it is not "factually incorrect." The u in coulour was chosen by a 
> school of 19th-century grammarians....who added it to words that had 
> preferentially been -or. The "factually incorrect" part is the condensation 
> of "who added it to words that had preferentially been -or" for the sake of 
> brevity and to get to the kernel rather than wandering all over the map on 
> a subject that is quite peripheral to B-Hebrew.
>   

Well, I still don't see how this is consistent with the fact, which you 
admitted, that the spellings in -our were preferred by the 18th century 
lexicographer Samuel Johnson, whose work was considered a standard at 
least here in the UK at the beginning of the 19th century. If this was 
the standard spelling at the start of the 19th century (even if perhaps 
not a century or two earlier), how can it have been added by 19th 
century grammarians? But this list is not the place to discuss such issues.
> ...
> The comment about dot edu is a synecdoche. It does not claim precedence for 
> US university sites.
>   

Well, fair enough, but why then did you reject my evidence from a 
Canadian university site?
>   
> >  I am very aware that I cannot trust everything I read on the Internet. 
> > But I found enough to demonstrate that what you had claimed, that the 
> > spellings "colour" and "honour" were a 19th century innovation, was very 
> > far from the whole story -
> >     
>
> As I said, if someone is interested, they ask.  It is a long story that 
> only tangentially has anything to do with this list; hence, condensation 
> and simplification.
>
>   
> > because Shakespeare's first edition printers and Samuel Johnson had used 
> > them. (I don't care what was written in a manuscript by the relatively 
> > uneducated Shakespeare, who couldn't even spell his own name consistently;
> >     
>
> You're doing it again. And while I realize it was Sapir who brought up 
> Shakespeare... and as there is only one folio that may have S's holograph.. 
> but a number of documents that have his signature... And that documents 
> signed in London have a different phonetic spelling from documents signed 
> in Stratford.... Isn't that your point re: dialectic differences??? .
>   

Well, if you want to do what you objected to me doing, raise an aside to 
a main point: The variation in Shakespeare's signature may be an 
indicator of dialect differences, but it may also indicate that in those 
days ordinary people did not bother about consistency of spelling, and 
perhaps that different spelling conventions were in use in London from 
those in Stratford-on-Avon (not to be confused with the London suburb of 
Stratford which will be the site of the 2012 Olympics).

>  >I am more interested in the spelling conventions used by the printing 
> houses of his time.)
>
> The evidence of what you have been postulating is in the hand-written 
> texts...it can be found in the inconsistency in orthography, among other 
> things,  -- it is in precisely the documents and people that you condemn as 
> "relatively uneducated" because he "couldn't even spell his own name 
> consistently."
>
> Phonetic spelling means that people write what they hear. You should see 
> the way theatre owner Henslow (or Henslowe) spelled his authors' 
> names  Then there was Reformation printer John Day (or Daye)... and this is 
> also relevant to ancient and Biblical Hebrew.
>   

So, are you suggesting that Henslow(e), Day(e) and Shakespear(e) 
sometimes pronounced a final "e" on their name and sometimes didn't? 
That seems somewhat improbable. I suspect that at least by Shakespeare's 
time the final -e's were the kind of silent flourish which some people 
still like to add to their names to make them look more distinguished, 
perhaps pseudo-French and aristocratic. I very much doubt if they 
reflect pronunciation change, which makes them reasonable parallels to 
my original point on Hebrew. But then I admit that I don't know but am 
speculating here.
> Learn to recognize what standardization means and how it forms audience 
> expectations. Modern education  teaches standardized orthography. It 
> wasn't. To enforcce standardized orthography on ancient documents is 
> destructive of evidence.
>
> Nobody is forcing you to abandon editions, but this concentration on 
> editions certainly explains a lot.
>   

If I want to examine the spelling conventions used by London publishers 
in the 16th-17th century, I need to concentrate on the editions which 
they prepared rather than on handwritten matter. But to be honest, as a 
non-expert I am reliant on what I can get easy access to, which in this 
case is the early printed editions of Shakespeare with their original 
spelling (as well as modernised spelling versions which I am not relying 
on).

--
Peter Kirk
peter AT qaya.org (personal)
peterkirk AT qaya.org (work)
http://www.qaya.org/