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A friend asked me a question I couldn't answer, but thought perhaps you could:
..why does our language make "fire-y" into "fier-y"
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if you go back far enough, the spellings were fyr and fyry. "the offbeat spelling is a relic of one of the attempts to render O.E. "y" in fyr in a changing system of vowel sounds." [Online Etymology Dictionary]
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The short answer is because our English spelling system is not rational. It is not based on rules. How we spell is oftentimes a mixture of etymological wishful thinking and historical accidents.
For the long answer we have to look at the languages that present-day English are decended from: Middle English and Old English. Fire in Old English (sometimes called Anglo-Saxon) was fȳr (alt. fīr). By the time Old English had turned into Middle English, fȳr had become fīr (also spelled fier, vir, fer, ver, feir, veir, fur, fuir, vur, feur, feor, foir). What happened? Why so many different spellings. Well, some big changes took place between when Old English and Middle English were spoken and written. Old English was pretty much written as it was spoken (and there were a few dialects), but towards the end of the Old English period, one dialect and its orthography were used in the chanceries of all the different English kingdoms. The in 1066 CE, a Frenchified Viking named Guillaume conquored those Old English kingdoms and became William the Conqueror. Old English was replaced by the Norman dialect of Old French. By the time English again became the language of the English court, Old English was long gone, and Middle English took its place. Many of the literate people (monks usually) had been trained in the Norman spelling system, and when they started to write down Middle English they used a mixture of the old Old English orthographies and the new-fangled Continental systems. Then another huge linguistic event took place: the Great English Vowel Movement. Most of the vowel sounds in English changed how they were pronounced. That's why English "long" vowels (actually usually diphthongs in the Early Modern to Present Day English are not pronounced like the rest of the Europeans languages pronounce them. (Think Italian vowels or Spanish, instead of the English.) Fiery was first recorded in the Middle English period written something like furie. By the time of Nathan Bailey's dictionary (1721) and Dr Johnson's (1755), the spelling had been fixed as fiery.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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zmjezhd: [blowing kiss e] :-)
Welcome, LST. If you think about it, fiery is more phonetically accurate than firey. Phonetically, I guess fire should be fier, and ire should be ier, etc. Weird. Yes, that was intentional.
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thank you zmjezhd. the way you told that story reminded me of David Crystal's Stories of English which had many similar fascinating etymological histories in it.
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zmjezhd: [blowing kiss e] :-)
Welcome, LST. If you think about it, fiery is more phonetically accurate than firey. Phonetically, I guess fire should be fier, and ire should be ier, etc. Weird. Yes, that was intentional. And WEIRD comes to us from WYRD (meaning "fate"), referring to the "weird sisters", the Fates. And Shakespeard employed them as the 'three witches". And the adjective grew out of Shakespeares' interpretation.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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You knew that! I cannot WOW you.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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Nope. I have always hated Shakespeare, and thus never had the slightest interest in learning anything about him or his daggoned unreadable plays. Nor did I know about WYRD (meaning "fate") . So, thank you.
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his daggoned unreadable plays I could never read plays, either. That shouldn't stop you from going to see one. It's a completely different experience. If the actors are any good at all you will understand the play a lot better than you ever could by trying to read it.
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i agree with faldage that seeing shakespeare plays is better than reading them. if anybody likes adaptations i can recommend two from vishal bharadwaj, maqbool from macbeth and omkara from othello.
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There's a film from the mid-'60s called Shakespeare Wallah by Satyajit Ray. It's about some British actors putting on Shakespeare in post-colonial India.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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There's a film from the mid-'60s called Shakespeare Wallah by Satyajit Ray. It's about some British actors putting on Shakespeare in post-colonial India. It's not a Ray film, it's by James Ivory and is the story of the Kendals, one of whom became quite famous in England while her sister married into Bollywood royalty, the Kapoors. I haven't seen the movie yet myself though I do want to. If it were from the Bangla master Ray, it would likely have been more like shakepseare with everybody dead after 3 hours of existential agony.
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It's not a Ray film, it's by James Ivory and is the story of the KendalsMy mistake. I saw it with a bunch of Ray films, and got confused. Though, in looking at its entry on IMDB ( link), I see that Satyajit Ray composed the music for it.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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That shouldn't stop you from going to see one. I did; we have Shakespeare in Central Park in the summers. It was the one with the witches doing 'boil, boil, toil and trouble'; it was okay. Plus, my beloved Maverick explained me a bit about the one with the king trying to decide what to leave his 3(?) daughters, and recited some for me in his outdoor theatre in Wales; now THAT was something!
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The school system took us to see a professional production of A Comedy of Errors in grade 2 - broad slapstick and dirty jokes that shocked my 6 year old self.
I fell in love with live theatre, and Shakespearean comedies on the spot.
I will be seeing All's Well That Ends Well next week and Comedy of Errors later this summer.
One of my favourites was Taming of the Shrew set in the wild west with every western movie cliche tucked in somewhere although sometimes quite subtly.
Last edited by Zed; 07/14/09 03:14 AM.
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That shouldn't stop you from going to see one. Plus, my beloved Maverick explained me a bit about the one with the king trying to decide what to leave his 3(?) daughters, and recited some for me in his outdoor theatre in Wales; now THAT was something! now that would be King Lear -- I'm right now reading Fool, by Christopher Moore, a somewhat similar tale as narrated by The Fool. It's great fun!
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King Lear...It's great fun!
2 mutually exclusive phrases I would have thought were not capable of existing in the same paragraph. Although there is again a Hindi filmi connection
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Not to mention Akira Kurosawa's Ran.
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2 mutually exclusive phrases I would have thought were not capable of existing in the same paragraph.  I'm right now reading Fool, by Christopher Moore As soon as the main library gets it to my local branch, I'm going to start Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Anybody got any advice (or warnings)?
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