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hellhammerdeath · 5 months

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My guide to understanding my alternative English orthography style

As suggested by the title, this post exists to explain why I do what I do, to teach what these various symbols and practices mean, and how/why I'm using them.

General Stuff

I'm not attempting to create a phonemic spelling alternative to standard English orthography. Some of my changes are purely cosmetic and I've kept many things the same as in standard English. For example, I've kept the "ou" in words like "thou" even though I think "au" would be better, as they do in German. This is because I think a total spelling conversion to a more phonemic style would take too much getting used to for the average reader, and I'm already asking for quite a lot as is. Some people might like it, but I'd like to make at least some attempt to meet people where they are, so I'd prefer not to make things even harder than they already are. Maybe someday I'll explore some more changes in that direction, but not yet.

I am not attempting a version of Anglish (A project that seeks to imagine what English might have looked like had the Norman Conquest not happened), though I am interested in Anglish, so I still use words of Latin and Greek origin, but much of what I do does take influence from much of the work done by Anglishers.

I would also like to clarify that this is very much simply a hobby of mine and I have no illusions of this being more important than it is. It's just for fun.

Old Letters

Æ/æ (Ash)

Ash is a letter used in Old English to represent the "a" sound found in words like "cat" (In General American English). It is also used in some older spellings of words of Latin or Greek origin. In the past I would use it liberally by simply replacing any instance of "a" whenever it made the "cat" sound, but now I generally only use it for words that derive from Old English words that used to use it or for words of Latin/Greek origin which used to be spelled with it.

Œ/œ (Ethel)

Ethel is a letter generally used in some words of French, Latin, or Greek origin. Though it is still used in French, it is only rarely used in Contemporary English. I cannot find any readily available histories about Ethel, but it does not appear to have been used too far back in the history of English. In my research, I've found that Ethel has been used in English with all sorts of words with many different kinds of pronunciations, so it would take a bit too long for me to go into detail about that, but generally when it appears in a word it is still recognizable, such as in "phœnix" (phoenix) or "œsophagus" (esophagus).

Ð/ð (Eth) and Þ/þ (Thorn)

Eth and Thorn are two letters used in Old English to represent a "th" sound. Historically, in Old English, they were used interchangeably with each other before Thorn eventually won out in popularity. There is a misconception that Thorn and Eth represent particular kinds of "th" sounds, but it appears that Thorn is generally preferred for initial instances of "th" while Eth is generally used elsewhere. There is also a misconception that in Modern Icelandic, Eth and Thorn supposedly take on unique sounds, but that isn't true for Icelandic either, but as I am not too well-versed on Icelandic, I will not go too much into detail there.

Ƿ/ƿ (Wynn)

Wynn is a letter used in Old English to represent a "w" sound. As some might know, the letter "w" didn't exist in the Latin alphabet until centuries after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, so before the introduction of "w" in English, Wynn was used. Obviously, Wynn looks a lot like a "p" in many typesets, so most people don't like it for that reason, but a few don't mind it.

Ȝ/ȝ (Yogh)

Yogh was used in Middle English to represent a few sounds, such as "g," "gh," and "y". It evolved from the Insular G (Ᵹ/ᵹ) which was used in the scripts used in Ireland and England. The letter survived a bit longer in Scots than English. I don't use it very often because in most typescripts it resembles the number 3, so whenever I do, I typically restrict its use to replacing the "gh" found in words like "enough" and "night," so for me it's purely a cosmetic spelling change rather than a change that represents a particular sound.

Shakespearian Stuff

Thou and Thee

The difference between thou and thee is basically the same as he and him. It's always "I see thee" and never "I see thou." Likewise, it is always "Thou seest me" and never "Thee seest me."

Verbs paired with thou always take either the -st or -est endings. For example, for present tense "Thou makest a sword" and for past tense "Thou didst make a sword." Another example, for present tense "Thou hast a sword" and for past tense "Thou hadst a sword."

For the verb "to be", the conjugation for thou is "thou art" for present tense and "thou wert" for past tense.

The -eth ending

The -eth ending is for third person verbs. For example, "He runneth."

Thy and Thine

Thy and thine are used like "your" and "yours". If a word begins with a vowel then you can use thine, such as in "thine eyes." If it doesn't, then you can use thy, such as in "thy sword." If it's a situation where you'd use "yours", such as in "It is yours" then you would say "It is thine."

Runes

I use the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc runic alphabet rather than the Younger Futhark or the Elder Futhark because I think it makes more sense to use an alphabet that was designed with English in mind rather than Old Norse. I generally restrict the use of runes to proper nouns, such as names and titles. If you want to learn more about how to use runes for Modern English, I recommend this guide here. This isn't an authoritative guide by any means, so you can always feel free to make changes. Please keep in mind that runes are not a 1:1 replacement of the Latin alphabet, so please don't make the mistake of assuming that you can just replace each letter of the alphabet with a corresponding rune, because it doesn't always work that way. You can get away with this for many letters but not all. For example, there is a specific rune for the "ing" sound, so you would use that rather than using three runes to represent all three of those letters.

Roman Numerals

I use Roman Numerals whenever I have to use a number. There are many guides to Roman Numerals available on the internet already so I won't link any particular one.

Other Changes

Replacing C with K

I will generally do this whenever C is making the same type of sound as K. If a word has CK in it, I use two Ks. This is because most modern Germanic languages prefer K over C and my guess is that English probably would have followed the same trend had the Norman Conquest not happened, and also because I think K looks cooler than C.

Replacing S with Z

I do this whenever S is making the same type of sound as Z. Unlike English, Dutch and German do a bit more in their languages to make a distinction between these two sounds. Obviously the Z in German is used differently than in English and Dutch, but, still, German recognizes the differences between these two types of sounds and makes an effort to deal with that in their orthography. Another big reason for using Z is, of course, because I think Z looks cool and I think it deserves to be used more.

Writing "Of" as "Ov"

I do this because "of" has a "V" sound, not an "F" sound, and, most importantly, because it looks cooler.

Grave accent

The grave accent is rarely used in English, but occasionally used to indicate that a usually silent vowel is meant to be pronounced. For example, in the word "looked" you usually would not pronounce the "e", but if it is spelled with the grave accent, as in "lookèd", this indicates that the "e" is meant to be pronounced.

#my orthography #my stuff #my work

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apprenticebard · 7 years

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I'm not a particularly big fan of many of our other national landmarks, but I think the SOL is by far the most egregious example. I'm disinclined to say that depicting pagan deities is inherently wrong; the trouble comes from granting them importance. So when you depict a pagan deity, you need to be careful not to vault over the line from "retelling ancient stories" to "identifying with a false god and making it synonymous with your nation". The SOL was actually created to do the latter.

Hm. So the difficulty comes when we grant pagan deities symbolic importance, even if we don’t “worship” them. I don’t think I agree that that’s necessarily a sin, but it strikes me as the sort of thing that reasonable people can disagree about, and I grant that using pagan deities as national symbols is the sort of thing that could certainly lead to trouble.

I suppose I have to admit that if I didn’t have any sentimental attachment to the statue (and the poem), building a giant statue of a Roman goddess and making it a symbol of the country would seem like a bad idea.

God is the only one who creates things ex nihilo, so all sin is only a corrupted form of something God created to be good. Much sin or perhaps all of it can be defined as putting something before God. It is good to be endlessly forgiving of your spouse, but it’s bad to “stand with your spouse right or wrong”, because God is the right thing, and doing the right thing should come before your spouse, or before anything else; it’s the same way with patriotism.

There is both figurative and literal idolatry. Many Christians believe that idolatry is what I’ve described, putting something else before God, but that’s only figurative idolatry. Literal idolatry is something we’ve forgotten, blocked out of our minds, even though it’s obvious - the creation and worship of an inanimate deity intended to represent what we put before God. We’re all figurative idolators, ie, sinners, but America does both in parallel; this is certainly and harshly condemned.

Hm. We’ve established that neither of us has an “America, right or wrong” attitude, so we haven’t actually put our country before our moral system (which I would hope, in our case, is founded on our understanding of the will of God). I suppose my specific objections here are 1) I think you’re exaggerating the importance that people place on the SOL, and 2) I don’t see how people “worship” it, even as a lesser deity than God. As I said, I like the Statue of Liberty (….I will admit that I liked her more before I realized she was meant to be a Roman goddess, but I still love that poem). I probably like her more than the average American, but I’d say that the way I interact with God and the way I think of the Statue of Liberty are very clearly different. I don’t think of the statue as an entity that can do anything for me, I don’t ask it for help, I don’t tell it how great it is, I don’t often tell other people how great it is, and I’m not trying to please it or do what it wants. I don’t think of the statue as having a will. It doesn’t even represent something that has a will, except insofar as it represents America. I guess America has about 300 million wills.

The point is, I care more about my mom and my friends and my job and the novel I’m writing than I do about the SOL. I don’t see why caring about the SOL should be idolatry if those other things aren’t, even if the statue is meant to depict a deity.

I think that in the foundational documents of our country, you can find a truly good ideal of liberty, something that’s fundamentally true and consequently is Godly wisdom. But the SOL is a physical manifestation of our twisting that ideal and putting it before God; as long as it stands, we can know that we are fundamentally on the wrong path. One could see it as a message from God through sin that we have made a terrible mistake.

I will admit that I don’t know enough about what went into the creation of the SOL in order to agree with or dispute the idea that it’s celebrating something different than the right referenced in the Declaration of Independence.

I only partly intended the abortion connection as evidence that the SOL is an idol; rather, my primary intent was to demonstrate that if you accept a Biblically-informed view of the nature and consequences of idols, the otherwise-inexplicable sudden-onset insanity of the sexual revolution, legal abortion, and abortion culture all suddenly make sense: that’s just what idols do; that’s a common historical symptom of idolatry, that’s why idols are bad, all kinds of sin are done in their name.

I don’t think the sexual revolution or abortion came out of nowhere, and I think it would be very weird if the consequences of the idol didn’t occur until almost a hundred years after its design. Everyone involved in the SOL’s creation was already dead by 1970! Why should the consequences hit us that decade?

As I said, I don’t think all of the sin the US has committed is a result of the SOL; that’s obviously, trivially false. I mostly think that it’s a dark beacon of our sin, that it’s such a stupidly blatant sin that of course we’d be cursed by God to commit worse sins than the ones whose cessation we were celebrating, and that in the unlikely event that we get wise to it and tear it down, our national lifespan would increase as a natural result.

I don’t know that God curses people to commit sins. (I know the verses in exodus where God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart”, but that’s the only relevant example I can think of.)

I’m glad you acknowledge that plenty of awful things happened before the Statue of Liberty was erected.

And most of all, when I realized how the SOL is the exact sort of thing the Bible most harshly condemns, that induced the realization that a depressingly low number of people historically have been as spiritually observant as they’d said. If we’ve really gotten so much less religious in the past century and a half, how on Earth did an ostensibly very Christian nation allow a new pagan idol to become one of its chief symbols?

Oh yeah, I definitely agree with this assertion. We were never as Christian as the right-wing Christian patriots want to believe we were. If anything, I think the way that I was taught American history as a child comes closer to idolatry than anything I was taught about the Statue of Liberty. We were told we were a chosen people, a new Israel, the greatest country in the world, and that we’d taken the lands of the Native Americans and broken all our promises to them because God had “blessed us with expansion”. If that’s not the sin of pride, what is?

A lot of our Christian heritage was a skin-deep cultural thing, I think. That’s not to say that the Puritans in Massachusetts or the Quakers in Pennsylvania or the Catholics in Maryland weren’t sincere in their belief–certainly it takes sincere belief to risk your life for the sake of being allowed to worship freely. It’s just that in any culture where a certain religion is expected, people will go through the motions for the sake of their neighbors, not for God. Just as giving the Church earthly power leads to people claiming faith to gain power, giving the Church social power leads to people claiming faith to avoid ostracism. These aren’t mechanisms that lead people to genuine faith very effectively.

I agree with you on the cosmic insignificance of America; in fact, though I desperately want to save it, I don’t believe it’s going to happen, and I currently hope to move out sometime in my lifetime - I just worry I’ll put it off too long.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. Nobody down here does, I don’t think. But that’s OK; I know the important things, and there’s plenty of work left to be done down here, for as long as God gives us to do it. I’m not looking for opportunities to leave–I think I can help more people by working here than I could if I worked anywhere else.

I hope things go well for you.

I also agree with you about the corruptibility of combined spiritual and political power - though that’s the primary reason I’m not a Catholic! (I’m not one of the types who thinks Catholics aren’t saved or that they’re the final boss, though.)

I like to think we’ve learned a bit since the middle ages. The modern Church doesn’t hold anything close to the level of political power it once did, and I think that’s for the best.

In any case, I’m glad to hear you count us as part of the faithful. It’s a bit of a relief; I’ve spent too much time with protestants whose first association with idolatry is “you know, those Catholics make wood carvings of Mary sometimes.”

I’m glad that you’re intrigued by my position; it’s been very pleasant interacting with you, and I hope to do so more in the future, though I’ll be very busy for the next few days. I’m also a writer; I wish you good luck in those endeavors. :) Praise God. +

I’m glad you’ve found it pleasant! I love interacting with people who believe things I’ve never heard of, especially if they have reasons to back them up. I used to get a lot of that from the Catholic forums I’d visit (for a group with more official teachings than perhaps any of the Protestant sects, faithful Catholics hold a very wide range of opinions when it comes to specific questions that fall outside those official teachings), but I haven’t had the energy to read those threads lately. So this has been nice, and I want to thank you for sharing your perspective with me.

Best of luck to you, too.

#bard says things #asks #anon #catholic stuff

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