posted by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
eftychia at 02:40am on 2011-09-12
eftychia at 02:40am on 2011-09-12Why isn't "vacuum" spelled with a 'w' (i.e. 'vacwm')? I mean, it's got a literal double-'u' in it right there (and 'w' replaced 'uu' in other words, 'uu' having replaced wynn (ƿ) which had replaced 'uu' even earlier (apparently they went back to 'uu' because wynn was too easily confused with 'p')).
Yeah, I should be asleep.
As long as I'm thinking about wynns, have a familiar song I've been playing with (I haven't been able to get yogh and wynn to print, so this took a trip out through the printer and back in through the scanner so I could hand-draw the yoghs):
(Should I have called it "The Anachronist's Alphabet Song"?)
And now, a word from the Doctor
`⁄ €‹›fifl‡°·‚—±
`¡™£¢∞§¶•ªº–≠
Œ„´‰ˇÁ¨ˆØ∏”’»
œ∑´®†¥¨ˆøπ“‘«
ÅÍÎÏ˝ÓÔÒÚÆ
åß∂ƒ©˙∆˚¬…æ
¸˛Ç◊ı˜Â¯˘¿
Ω≈ç√∫˜µ≤≥÷
Just testing there; I'm on my wife's MacBook and I'm not familiar with the combinations.
Now... æ is certainly a letter in Old English, not just a ligature like fi or fl. The scribes used it to represent the "short a" sound of the rune "ash", which is what the letter is called; sometimes also spelled "aesc" or "æsc", as in OE... sorry, Old English. ... Ah, I see you use that one in your song.
Next: Surely you're not serious about "vacuum", the Latin adjective meaning "empty" in the neuter nominative/accusative singular! Or perhaps I should write it "uacuum", as the mediæval scribes did, or "VACVVM" as it would have been inscribed in stone or on a Roman wax note table. Anyhow, they pronounced it in 3 syllables, VAC-u-um, whereas our consonant "w" doesn't even make one syllable. Like you, I'm excluding loanwords, like Welsh (Cymraeg) "cwm".
Odd that you should mention this, just as I'm working on... well, God & Muses willing, I'll have it done & out there in a week or two. And BTW, you have heard Sassafrass's Futhark Song (http://www.youtube.com/user/sassafrasssingers#p/a/u/1/Im0KoQw6RBM), /'hævənt ju:/?
Dr. Whom, consulting linguist, grammarian, orthoëpist, & philological busybody
(& thanks to rubynye for pointing me here!)
(No, thank you very much, I'll skip "Check spelling during preview".)
The one good thing about ignorance is that it's curable
Actually, I was 3/4-serious but hadn't gotten quite serious enough to Google the answer yet. I had a guess ... that turned out to be wrong (or at least not quite right, call it 'incomplete'?) -- I figured it was pronunciation-based ... that if we were speaking Welsh, it might have gotten turned into 'vacwm', but not in English because 'w' doesn't make that particular sound in English. I didn't know that 'vacuum' was three syllables in Latin! (Hey, I studied Greek instead.) That means my terribly vague, admittedly cop-out second guess -- "It has something to do with the etymology" -- was right, but was such a broad target that I probably don't get any points for it.
"you have heard Sassafrass's Futhark Song"
Well I have now (and thank you for that -- I loved it). Wow, it's been way too long since I've gotten to Arisia.
Thanks for the education!
Re: The one good thing about ignorance is that it's curable