Colin Gorrie posts thus at Dead Language Society:
A man takes a train from London to the coast. He’s visiting a town called Wulfleet. It’s small and old, the kind of place with a pub that’s been pouring pints since the Battle of Bosworth Field. He’s going to write about it for his blog. He’s excited.
He arrives, he checks in. He walks to the cute B&B he’d picked out online. And he writes it all up like any good travel blogger would: in that breezy LiveJournal style from 25 years ago, perhaps, in his case, trying a little too hard.
But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger’s voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler.
By the middle of his post, he’s writing in what might as well be a foreign language.
But it’s not a foreign language. It’s all English.
A good idea, well executed. I admit I suspected a typo in the 1300 passage when I got to “His vois was as þe crying of rauenes, scharpe and schille” — should that last word be “schrille”? — but no, it turns out shrill didn’t enter English for another century or so: c1400 (?c1380) “Wyth a schrylle scharp schout þay schewe þyse worde.” The older word was in fact the OED’s shill ‘Sonorous, resonant, shrill.’ (That entry is from 1914, but the shrill one was revised in 2024, and its etymology section says “Probably an alteration of shill adj., with insertion of ‑r‑, perhaps as a result of association with shrike v. or shream v.”) In the same passage, “Swie!” is the good old Germanic verb ‘to be silent’ (German schweigen). At the end Gorrie explains what’s happened in the later (earlier) bits for those whose linguistic intuition failed them sometime around the fourteenth century. Thanks, Bathrobe!
No comments? Fine. Have some pedantry.
“Yes, it’s the typical English coastal town: the seagulls, the cobblestone streets, the works.”
This threw me, because I’m not used to “the works” as an integral part of a list, but something that comes after the list: “the seagulls, the pie shops, the cobblestone streets. You know, the works!” Another possibility is that “the works” is following a list of only two items: “(1)the seagulls, (2)the cobblestone streets, the works” as opposed to “(1)the seagulls, (3)the cobblestone streets, (3)the works.” But that’s also weird to me, because a list like this feels like it should come in threes.
Anyone else think this was awkward?
Reads fine by me (L2 AmE). “The works” meaning “and everything else typical to this scene” in this context sounds unremarkable to me. “You know, the works!” sounds awkward.
Otherwise, the writing comes off stilted and unnatural for all the eras, but the linguistic effort makes for interesting reading.
My reading is that “the works” here is similar to “etc.” in that both replace a list of unenumerated items. The difference is that “etc.” excludes the previously enumerated items (in this instance, seagulls and cobblestone streets) whereas “the works” includes them. Possible synonyms of “the works” that would likewise include previously enumerated items include “everything” or “all that jazz”.
What Y and mollymooly said; it reads perfectly normally to me.
the writing comes off stilted and unnatural for all the eras
As opposed to the slangy, colloquial Early Modern English we’re used to? He gives the literary sources he used for each form of English.
Apparently there are at least root cognates of shrill elsewhere in Germanic, including Old English – but German schrill is Low German schrell + the meaning adapted to English shrill and only entered the literary language, at least, after 1800…
Dutch has both schel, which can be used to describe voices and other sounds, and schril, which can be applied to voices but less commonly so (it’s a more literary register I’d say) and is also used in the sense of ‘stark’ as in in schril contrast ‘in stark contrast’.
Hat: I think what I am feeling is that while the sentences are well-formed and well-matched with their sources and the language of their times, they feel disconnected from each other. They don’t feel like a flowing discourse; kind of like a student’s composition in a foreign language class.
That said, Hamlet and Polonius attend a recitation of Beowulf in Shakespearean English is really good.
Norwegian has skrell n./m. and skrall n. for a loud, resounding noise. It’s archaic in that sense, but en/et skikkelig skrell is a surprise result in sports (like everyone’s favorite slashers, Bodø/Glimt, keep makiing these days). In that sense it’s probably borrowed from Swedish.
To add to what gido wrote:
https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/schel3
https://etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/schril
Interesting idea, but I’m a bit doubtful about the way he rolls together two issues:
– actual language change
– changes in the fashions of prose composition by educated people for publication.
That makes the amount of language change between say 1700 and the present look somewhat greater than I guess it really was.
Random example: if you look at the journals of Captain James Cook from the 1770s (available online at the National Museum of Australia), you can read many sentences that have only occasional clues that the writing is not completely modern, like the points asterisked in this sample:
“It is indefferently well watered, even in the dry Seasons, with small Brooks and springs, but no great Rivers, unless it *be* in the wet Season when the low lands and Vallies near the Sea I *do* suppose are mostly laid under water; the small brooks may then become large Rivers but this can only happen with the Tropick.”
I did find the LJ version surprisingly stilted – I know he said the writer was trying too hard, but I feel like that would more likely have come out over-ornate. (And ‘real specific’ feels wrong for the geographical setting.)
It doesn’t show as much in the more formal writing, but it’s hard to be really fluent in someone else’s voice.
I did find it interesting to read. 1400 is fine – it’s mostly getting your head round the spelling. 1300 too, although I’m not sure about ‘swie’. 1200 looked incomprehensible at first glance, but got easier once I got used to ‘uu’, although there were a few words I was guessing from context. 1100 is a mix of bits that suddenly make sense as I pick my way through them, and bits that just don’t – and some of what I’m recognising isn’t from modern English (‘nimen’). 1000 is odd bits I get in more that I don’t – I probably could get more (I’ve just got ‘fuglas on nette’), but it takes more concentration than I have to spare.
@Julian: Random example: if you look at the journals of Captain James Cook from the 1770s (available online at the National Museum of Australia), you can read many sentences that have only occasional clues that the writing is not completely modern, like the points asterisked in this sample:
“It is indefferently well watered, even in the dry Seasons, with small Brooks and springs, but no great Rivers, unless it *be* in the wet Season when the low lands and Vallies near the Sea I *do* suppose are mostly laid under water; the small brooks may then become large Rivers but this can only happen with the Tropick.”
I agree that Gorrie rolls changes in spelling, vocabulary, and grammar together with changes in style, but I’d put more asterisks on that sentence. Wouldn’t we now say
fairly/pretty well watered
no big/large rivers
mostly under water (no “laid”)?
And what does “with the tropic” mean?
“Brook”, too. “Stream” would be used instead.
The run-on sentence with lots of commas would be disfavored nowadays.
It may have helped having access to a set of Germanic cognates that most English speakers don’t, but I read it with surprising ease almost until the end — which is also sort of cheating, because each century back in time primes you for the next.
I don’t find ‘brook’ unnatural, but perhaps that’s because I know of local watercourses called ‘the [Something] Brook’.
‘Indifferently well’ was certainly the first point that struck me as needing an asterisk.
In AmEng “brook” is a regionalism mostly found in New England and nearby, but a regionalism is not the same thing as an archaism. See the fairly striking map here: https://toponymia.wordpress.com/2009/11/25/creeks-and-brooks/
“Brook” is perfectly natural and contemporary for me.
That’s a striking map indeed. However, it reflects old usage, not much distant from Captain Cook’s. Would a Mainer or a Vermonter these days describe a small stream as a brook?
Ed.: @DE, would you describe a stream as a brook, say if describing it in a new landscape?
My mother grew up in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and she uses brook quite a bit. I picked it up from her, although I don’t use the word nearly as much as I used to. Another regional term for a creek is kill, mostly found in New York, since the word comes from Dutch.
“Brook” seems normal to me as well.
The best kill is in my native Delaware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murderkill_River. Although pretty much every stream in Delaware not formally called a river is a creek.* Even in the former New Netherlands I’m not sure if “kill” is really used generically these days.
*When I was a young boy, the kids in the neighborhood just referred to the stream that ran through the woods down past the end of the block as “the creek,” or maybe we meant “The Creek.” That was a formally-unnamed tributary of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellpot_Creek, which is one of comparatively few U.S. hydronyms with a Swedish etymology.
would you describe a stream as a brook, say if describing it in a new landscape?
Sure.
Brooks tend to be smaller than generic streams. You couldn’t have a mighty brook.
Guessing a bit . . .
1) The OED notes that in older usage, “tropic” was sometimes used where we would expect “tropical”.
2) The Gutenberg copy of Cook’s journal supports this; Cook writes things like “Saw a Tropic Bird”.
3) He may have simply left out the following word, which, given that the preceding clause is about small brooks becoming large rivers, could have been “monsoons” or “storms”.
And of course, Captain Cook was rendered permanently incapable of editing or correcting his own works at the later time when they were prepared for publication.
The quoted text was taken from Cook’s description of New Holland
The handwritten text is in the middle of this page image, after some crossouts. The word “Tropick” ends with a very firm period.
Another possibility raised by the OED is that “tropic” can mean “turning point”, so perhaps he intended the time of the [austral] winter solstice and the coinciding storms.
10/10, no notes.
Given Dutch schildpad I’m not so sure…
Tropicbird?
A tropicbird is a specific kind of seabird.
Ed. Jinx!
i don’t use “brook” as often as “stream” or “creek”, but they’re all active words for me. i’d probably be more likely to say “down by the brook there” in vermont, and to use “creek” in that formulation in tennessee, but that’s me mirroring local usage. and i think, hesitantly, that for me a brook may flow over loose rock but not cut itself a limestone bed, while a creek is the reverse (and either can run through clay or sandy soil), and a stream can do whatever it wants.
and overall in Julian’s example, i don’t see a phrase in there that i wouldn’t flag as having at least one resounding archaism, from “indifferently” (never mind “indifferently well”!) through “great rivers” and “laid under” to “the tropic”.
Previous discussion of Shellpot Creek; note the link (a couple of comments later) to a collection of a lot of different names and spellings from old maps.
In AmEng “brook” is a regionalism mostly found in New England and nearby … See the fairly striking map
At first I thought that must be the map discussed here in 2011 under THE GEOGRAPHY OF RIVER NAMES, which mapped brook, branch, run, and several others in different colors, but left creek in gray because it was so common. But no, two different people had the same idea! The brook vs. creek map is by Pfly (Paul Fly), the other is by Derek Watkins.
I wouldn’t say ‘brook’ except as part of a proper name – I have ‘burn’ as default and ‘stream’ as common alternative.
A UK version of the map would be interesting – I know that ‘burn’ turns up not just down through Northumberland, but in Westmorland (around Alston it looks like anything running into the Tyne is a burn and anything running into the Tees is a beck, to a first approximation).
I did find this one, but it seems to be restricted to rivers too large to be really interesting – no English burns or becks or bournes, and no Scottish allts. The domination of southern Scotland by ‘water’ is striking, but that’s really a river name rather than a stream name – if you zoom in on an OS map the smaller watercourses running into the waters are mostly burns.
Is there anywhere where ‘stream’ is a common place name element?
@Brett
That reminds me of a joke comic regarding a different Dutch kil, cognate with English chill (but translate as frigid, not as merely chilly).
Urbanus goes to purchase wallpaper from this evil witch, who of course he doesn’t know is evil. So that night, while he’s sleeping, the murderous enchanted wallpaper chants “kill, kill, kill!” But because Urbanus doesn’t speak English, he ends up shivering despite wrapping himself in all the warm blankets he can find, and the witch’s plot to turn him into a tool for evil is foiled once again.
I’m not entirely sure if the word kil as in kreek[1] is or isn’t part of my vocabulary. If it is, it means something like a trench out at sea in between two sandbanks (or wads). Kil as in a creek on land strikes me as a more southern affair.
[1] Dutch, not a typo.
>Is there anywhere where ‘stream’ is a common place name element?
The Gulf Stream.
Most British stream naming words can be found sporadically in America, although sometimes with additional disambiguators. I’ve seen a watercourse in named “[Something]burn stream,” and in the same vein is “Fishkill Creek.” England has drift as a rare stream naming term too, but that one I never have encountered over here.
Between Nottingham and Newark-on-Trent there are some streams called ‘dumble’, which is a lovely word I don’t ever remember coming across before.
I’d forgotten about the Borders ‘syke’, too.
A lovely word indeed! OED:
Etymology:
I’ll suggest that dimple/dumple goes back to *dympil, a diminutive of dump, meaning “a small depression in the ground (or another surface)”. There’s a reverse semantic parallel in the old Latin loan reflected as Norw. putt/pytt “hole filled with water, very small lake” and Eng. pit (and even (diminutive) puddle?) The meaning “narrow valley with running water” could be due to contamination with dingle (above). I have no bright idea for the etymology of that.
Translates straightforward into mainstream German as Pfütze, which looks like an exact cognate of pit.
(…but the word I’m actually used to is Lacke, and Lache also exists somewhere.)
Lache is Standard German, but at least in my dialect it implies a spilled liquid, like in Öllache, Blutlache. A Wasserlache is more extraordinary (in size or origin) than a Pfütze. If someone turns over a bucket of water, the result is a Lache, not a Pfütze. Rain results in Pfützen, but if a torrential rain or a flood leaves behind large puddles, they are Lachen.
Fascinating.
Lache being reserved for bigger ones does fit the use of Lacke in the names of the temporary salt lakes in the Seewinkel.
(And yes, Wasserlacke is what I’m actually used to; Lacke alone hardly seems to occur.)
a dumble sounds very much like what i would call a holler – a different regionalism being transplanted, i assume (though i wonder about geological differences: the hollers i know best, in middle tennessee, are in limestone areas; wikipedia describes at least one dumble area as “clay bedrock plateau made up of Mercia Mudstone”).
This reminds me of a short story by George Saunders, “My Chivalric Fiasco,” in which a character takes a pill called “KnightLyfe”® to help him with his improv in a role as a guard in some type of Renaissance fair.
The OED entry* for the oldest sense of dingle,
is quite interesting. There are only three cites: a medieval one (circa 1200), then quotes from Auden and Tolkien alluding to the lone medieval usage.
* Normally, I would reproduce the whole entry. However, at the moment I only have Internet via my phone.** Doing all the formatting would be pretty arduous typing with one thumb. If languagehat (or someone else) wants to post the full entry for that sense, that would be appreciated.
** On Friday the 13th (naturally), my desktop computer crashed irretrievably. In spite of the huge pain that is, I was initially grateful it hadn’t happened earlier. On Thursday, I had finally resubmitted online the extensive revisions to a journal article I had been working on for months with a (now graduated former) student. No data for the revisions has been lost, as it’s all on the cloud, but I wouldn’t have been able to work on the project without a functioning computer.
However, I quickly realized the timing was not mere fortunate coincidence. The computer had been a bit flaky for about a month, but it had remained functional. Then, after the final updates to our paper were uploaded to the journal and the arXiv, I installed a new game, meaning to take some time relaxing and playing. The game should not have been very demanding; it was a retro-style 2-D pixel platformer. But playing it destabilized the system, leading to the crash.
If languagehat (or someone else) wants to post the full entry for that sense, that would be appreciated.
Your wish is my command.
The etymology:
Richard de Dingyll is awfully alliterative.
C’est dingue…
Re: the “brook map”
I am skeptical of that map, having grown up in the Deep South and hearing both terms used interchangeably. I have also never, not once in my life, heard someone use the term “Coke” as a generic term for any carbonated soft drink unless it was specifically a cola-based beverage, and yet I constantly see that infamous map which purports to show “Coke” as the default equivalent of “soda” across much of the South.
I have a strong suspicion that the makers of these maps are leaning into the interesting corners of the data somewhat, the way a global map of languages will show large swaths of Wales and Ireland as “Celtic speaking” anywhere where the percentage of Celtic speakers rises above 10%.
@MK: This map, for example, is based on a survey question “What is your generic term for a sweetened carbonated beverage?” It does show a lot of “coke” answers, mostly in the south (with “soda” and “soft drink” lagging). I don’t see how it could be biased by the researchers. I’m surprised at the difference between it and your experience.
(I’m also surprised at generic “cocola”. The only times I’ve heard it, it referred to cola specifically. And, I heard it as “coke-cola”, to be more precise.)
As mentioned above in one of the block quotes, there’s a now-extremely-non-bucolic neighborhood in Liverpool known as the Dingle. Ringo Starr grew up there.* Wiki says the name comes from a small tributary of the Mersey rather generically named Dingle Brook.
*Reputedly once upon a time the roughtest-and-toughest of Liverpool’s many rough-and-tough working-class neighborhoods. Another British rock star, in trying to explain the background of the various Beatles to an American interviewer, glossed the Dingle as “like the fucking Bronx.”
I just learned that “Dumble” also has a non-hydronymic use as a brand name of custom-made guitar amplifier (apparently because that was the surname of the guy who made them), as described here. https://www.guitarworld.com/news/lost-dumble-resurfaces-after-40-years (The original buyer owned the one described for 40 years and apparently disputes that it was ever “lost” or that tracking him down and offering to buy it counts as “unearthing” it.)