Middle English lost a lot of g’s, when transitioning from Old English. At least according to my dictionary.
I will just cite the examples I know. ‘Eye’ was ēage in Old English. That actually makes sense, because eye, like Latin-derived ‘ocular’ ultimately comes from the Indo-european ‘okw-’, ‘to see’ (it helps to know both ‘k’ and ‘g’ are really the same sound, one voiced and one unvoiced). There’s more. The Scandinavian word ‘saga’ has the same root as ‘say’. Again ‘y’ has been transposed for a ‘g’. My dictionary also says, though rarely used today, the prefix ‘y-’ means ‘both together’. But even today in German, the same prefix is rendered ‘ge-’. I trust I’ve made my point.
Why has English lost all its g’s? And does it have anything to do with the fact g looks a little like y in print?
Thank you all in advance for your helpful replies.
What I want to know is why did old English lose the thorn? A single letter that covered ‘Th’ is pretty useful. Too bad the way it looks is what gives us the ‘Ye’ in ‘Ye old’ when it really is ‘The Old’.
By the Old English period, G had multiple allophones and was more often pronounced as /j/ or /x/ than as /g/
Old English scribes didn’t have J, U, and W—they didn’t exist in the Latin alphabet—and rarely used K, Q, and Z.
They added Æ (æsc), Ð (Edh), Þ(thorn), and Ƿ (Wynn)
Norman and Latin-trained scribes made a lot of changes to English spelling, making it match what they were hearing, changed a lot of the Gs where they didn’t hear what they considered a G sound and dropping Aesc, thorn, Edh, and Wynn.
Because when Caxton brought the first printing presses to England, it was manufactured in the Belgium, where they didn’t use the character, so it was not made into type. Most of the early presses were imported from Europe, too. “Y” looked close enough.
No, “thou” and “you” were different words. “Thou” was singular in Middle English, “you” was plural. Eventually, “you” became a polite / respectful singular as well, like vous in French, and slowly turned into the default way to address people as “thou” faded out.
“Thou” didn’t become “you.” It was replaced by “you” and that had nothing to do with spelling. Even after Caxton, English had thou/thee/thy/thine and ye/you/your/yours. Originally the distinction was singular versus plural, but the plural became the “polite” usage, like in other European languages, and it eventually displaced the “thou” set altogether. It has nothing to do with spelling or printing.
Well, if I was to take your question literally, it’s certainly not true, since there are now more than a thousand words in English with the letter g in them, as you can see in Words containing g | Words that contain g. What you’re asking is why in certain words the letter g became the letter y, vaguely in the period between Old English and Middle English, which would mean sometime after 1066 A.D. What happened was that in certain positions of the letter in words in Old English the sound evolved from g to y. I’m not expert enough in historical linguists to say exactly what positions this change happened. In phonology - Were -y- and -g- pronounced similarly in Early Middle English? - English Language & Usage Stack Exchange, it says that it tended to happen when the g was at the end of a syllable and when the g was next to a palatalized vowel, but I can’t swear that this is correct.
Just going by memory, I believe that most of the G sounds in words directclty descended to English from proto-Germanic eventually shifted to /j/ or other sounds (like “year”). My recollection is that most of the words in which G represents /g/ were adopted into English post-Anglo-Saxon period.
Yogh explains why “Menzies” is pronounced like “Mingus,” but it has nothing to do with the loss of G from “eye” and “year.” The /g/ sound left those words before the spelling reflected it.
The /g/ came back into some English words through Old Norse. That’s why we say “egg” instead of “ey.”
William Caxton tells an anecdote about confusion regarding the word for eggs in his Preface to Eneydos (1490):
Comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from a nother. In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchaũtes were in a ship in tamyse for to haue sayled ouer the see into zelande / and for lacke of wynde thei taryed atte forlond. and wente to lande for to refreshe them And one of theym named sheffelde a mercer cam in to an hows and axed for mete. and specyally he axyd after eggys And the goode wyf answerde. that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaũt was angry. for he also coude speke no frenshe. but wolde haue hadde egges / and she vnderstode hym not / And thenne at laste a nother sayd that he wolde haue eyren / then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel / Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte. egges or eyren / certaynly it is harde to playse euery man / bycause of dyuersite & chaũge of langage.
I’ve put that passage into modern spelling and punctuation to make it easier to follow:
Common English that is spoken in one shire varieth from another.
In so much, that in my days [it] happened that certain merchants were in a ship in [the] Thames for to have sailed over the sea into Zealand. And for lack of wind they taried at Foreland, and went to land for to refresh them.
And one of them, named Sheffield, a mercer, came into an house and asked for meat [i.e. food]. And specially he asked after eggs. And the good wife answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but would have had eggs and she understood him not.
And then at last another said that he would have eyren. Then the good wife said that she understood him well.
Lo! What should a man in these days now write, eggs or eyren? Certainly it is hard to please every man because of diversity and change of language.
We tend to forget how much local dialects differed from each other in earlier times.
FWIW, a traditional feature of a Berliner accent in German is that the hard g as in a ge- prefix, or words like “gut”, is pronounced like a ‘y’ (or in German spelling ‘j’).
As was hinted above, one problem is that after the Norman conquest, the scribes were Normans and used to writing in Latin and just substituted letters they knew for eth, thorn, aesch, and wynn.
The many pronunciations of ough come from the many dialects of middle English that all came together in London and some dialects prevailed in some words and other dialects in others. The process seems to have been random.
If you have a hundred spare hours, a lot of this is discussed in “Historyoftheenglishpodcast”. Including the OPs question.
But that doesn’t explain why the accusative or objective form you took over the 2nd person forms and not the nominative ye. I’ve never understood that.
And many exceptions to the soft-G before E or I rule come from Old Norse: get, give, gift and a number of less common words.
IIRC there were distinct additional letters for both the voiced “th” as in “the” and the unvoiced version as in “thin”.
According to the History Of English Podcast, we lost both of those letters because the printing presses imported from the Continent, whose languages didn’t use dental fricatives, didn’t have that letter.
