Sept. 23. 1854. J 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



249 



over them. As these appear to me to be essential, 

 I would adopt them in printing, as the scribes did 

 in writing. To give a full detail of my reasons, 

 would occupy more room than you can spare. I 

 will therefore conBne myself to general and very 

 brief answers to the two objections mentioned by 

 Db. Giles. 



I. Accents. — If by accent we mean a mark to 

 denote the sound or le7igth of a vowel, as I think 

 we must in this case, then I would ask if Dr. 

 Giles will affirm, "It is not a feature of the 

 English language to employ accents." Look only 

 at a few Anglo-Saxon words and their English 

 cognates : dd% a dale ; hdl, hale ; tdm, tame ; her, 

 here ; lif, life ; mil, a mile ; scir, shire ; wid, wide ; 

 mm, wine ; fur, fore ; and numerous other words 

 ending in silent e. What is the final e but the 

 mark or letter denoting the long sound of the pre- 

 ceding vowel ? We appear to have derived this 

 lengthened and bungling manner of expressing 

 the length of vowels from the Normans. They 

 sometimes denoted the long vowel by inserting a 

 fresh vowel, or by doubling the short one, as, dc, 

 an oak ; dr, an oar ; brad, broad ; bat, a boat ; 

 ran, rain ; rdd, a road ; swan, a swain ; /ul, foul ; 

 hus, house ; mus, mouse ; boc, a book ; coc, a 

 cook ; god, good ; sped, speed ; hel, heel ; gos, a 

 goose ; ges, geese. Compare the simple mode of 

 lengthening all the vowels by the Anglo-Saxons, 

 with the confused and tedious manner of their 

 Norman successors. With us, in the present day, 

 there is no remedy ; but surely, in printing 

 Anglo-Saxon, the accents ought not to be omitted ; 

 it distinguishes words and gives precision to them. 

 Db. Giles thinks " the context does this suffi- 

 ciently." But the practice of the Anglo-Saxons 

 and the Normans, and of the English down to the 

 present day, is against him. Thus we find, — 

 bat, a bat or club ; bat, a boat ; coc, a cock ; coc, 

 a cook ; fid, full ; ful, foul. Now, if the accent 

 be omitted in the Anglo-Saxon, the letter supply- 

 ing its place may also ; then there would be no 

 distinction between full and foul, and ftd sacc 

 might mean a full or a foul sack. But Db. Giles 

 would reject them because, he says, " there is no 

 certain rule observed " in the application of the 

 accents. It is true that the Norman scribes and 

 their scholars made sad confusion in accenting the 

 Anglo-Saxon works which they transcribed. But 

 surely their ignorance or carelessness will not 

 justify us in discarding Anglo-Saxon accents al- 

 together, especially since a careful observer may 

 discover some certain principles in the midst of 

 apparent confusion. On this subject the works 

 of Rask, and Grimm, and Bopp must be carefully 

 studied. But I must now advert to the other 

 subject. 



II. J> th, and « dh. — Dr. Giles's theory is, that 

 these cliaracters were introduced by Theodore, 

 and were of Greek origin. If so, how was it that 



i> and ^ were both used by the Danes in times so 

 early, that they could not have heard of Theodore? 

 By the Danes these characters were carried to 

 Iceland, where i> has always had the hard, and -5 

 the soft sound of our th. There, free from the 

 changes which have harassed more genial climes, 

 their language and writing have undergone little 

 or no change for ages ; and, even at this day, an 

 Icelander can read their earliest writings without 

 difficulty. 



Our forefathers, the Anglo-Saxons, had two 

 sounds of th while in their continental home on 

 the north-west corner of Germany. Their lan- 

 guage is called Old Saxon. Rask says : 



" In Old Saxon }> {th) is always found at the beginning 

 of words, wliere the Icelandic has t> ; but the Cottonian 

 MS. has commonly &, and the Cod. Bamberg, (which 

 Schnieller calls ' Heliand. Poema Saxonicum, seculi worn') 

 has a simple d in the middle and end of words, represent- 

 ing, no doubt, the Icel. 'S. It is manifest that the Anglo- 

 Saxon, as well as the Icel, ^, are from the Runic ]b." 



Here we have the 1> and '5, both used in Denmark 

 and Iceland in the earliest times ; and these let- 

 ters, or their representatives, are found in a MS. 

 of the ninth century in the Old Saxon dialect 

 of the country from Avhich the Anglo-Saxons 

 came to Britain. The theory relative to Theo- 

 dore therefore falls to the ground, and with it the 

 stronghold of Dr. Giles. The confounding of 

 ]> and tS by the Norman and other southern scribes, 

 chiefly employed as writers in this country, can- 

 not be surprising, when we remember that they 

 had not the sound of our th in their own language, 

 and that in writing Greek they were accustomed 

 to use a variety of characters to represent the 

 theta. But their confusion of \> and tS in this 

 country, is no proof that the two sounds, and the 

 characters representing them, did not exist. We 

 have seen that \> and "S, and their distinct sounds, 

 were used by the Icelanders and Old Saxons ; and, 

 doubtless, by the direct descendants of the Old 

 Saxons, the Angle, Engle, or English- Saxons, 

 from whom they have come down to us. In like 

 manner, the clumsy and circuitous Norman mode 

 of indicating long vowels by postfixing or inserting 

 other vowels, is no proof that the Anglo-Saxons 

 did not effect this by the much more simple 

 process of an accent over the vowels. If the 

 Anglo-Saxons used accented vowels, as well as i> 

 and -S, to denote definite sounds, surely it would be 

 great presumption in us to reject them in printing 

 their writings. I would therefore strongly urge 

 Db. Giles to use them in his proposed work. 



It must be acknowledged that the Germans, 

 with all their ingenuity and learning, have seemed 

 to mystify the Anglo-Saxon accents by their com- 

 plication ; and even Rask appears to have been 

 biassed by associating the Anglo-Saxon too closely 

 with the Scandinavian tongues. We must ever 

 remember that what we are speaking of is not 



