How To Address A Polish Letter

studying up on early modern english taughtme how an old letter and a printing press made us start mispronouncing a scottish name. in my search for the true sound of shakespeare,long hours at the library paid off... with way too many amazing subplots to squeeze intoone video. before i tuck them into my notebook and turnout the lights, let me share one story i really

How To Address A Polish Letter, loved about a different kind of english. thanks to a long linguistic past, there aremore varieties of english in the british isles than in the rest of the english-speaking world. at the extremes, these actually behave likedifferent languages.

we meet one of those extremes in the far north:scots. not gaelic, not standard english with a trillyscottish burr. scots. it's the local lowlands way of saying "scottish". just as their word inglis evolved to ingles,scottis shortened to scots. consider your company carefully before youweigh in on calling it a leid or a dialect. it's a bit of a charged issue. but either way, scots has its own separatehistory. the northern edges of middle english gaineda strong foothold in the lallans, pushing

scottish gaelic to the highlands. the scots leid emerged and evolved into itsown subbranch of anglic, complete with scots dialects and even a literary form with quirksof its own. quirks... like yogh. this early english letter was a form of gused for a few sounds, including the glide "y" in ye, and the raspy sound at the endof its own name: yo[x]. this letter didn't last down south - caxton'sprinting press would print "ye" and "you" like this.

but when scotland got its printing press,yogh was still alive in ye, you and in the name mackenyie. mackenyie? aye! see, back then printing involved wooden sticks,metal pieces, formes, two people to ink and press... it was a whole process. these weren't the days of holding down a keyon your phone until you get a little popup to choose the right special character. type was literally metal pieces stored ina type case.

so you'd print with the type you had on handand you would keep around just enough to print. that spelled the beginning of the end foryogh. the story goes that when the presses in scotlanddidn't have the type, the metal piece, for yogh in their wooden type cases, they justgrabbed the letter zed instead. close enough, right? especially since their handwritten forms lookedso similar at the time. it's not that confusing, either. after all, whether you call this letter zedor izzod, modern scots still doesn't use it much for the sound /z/.

but some words became so well-known in printthat, eventually, people based their pronunciation on that printed spelling, reading a z-soundback into a word that never had it in the first place. this shortcut didn't impact finzaen /ëˆféªå‹é™n/or drumelzier /dré™ëˆmé›ljé™r/, nor the earlier spelling of the isle of yell. but it is how mac"kenyie" turned into mac"kenzie". heh, this quirk is a great example of howlanguage varieties can preserve little bits of history, even events as specific as hauling a printing press into town and picking letters out of a box.

alright, enough followup. i'll get back to work on the next full tale,the one you patrons voted for. consider becoming a patron yourself if youwanna help me spend more time making videos. i deeply appreciate it. most importantly, stick around and subscribefor leid.