Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue: A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles — David Hume — John Shaqi
Of the Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britan Tongue: A Treates, noe shorter than necessarie, for the Schooles
David Hume · en
P. 21 (6). He disputes the possibility of a final _e_, separated from
a preceding vowel by a consonant, having any effect whatever in
altering the sound of the preceding vowel, and recommends the use of a
diphthong to express the sound required; as, hoep for hope, fier for
fire, bied for bide, befoer for before, maed for made, etc. He
uniformly throughout follows this rule.
P. 22 (5). Hume here accents difficultie on the antepenultimate
instead of the first syllable.
P. 23 (7). He puts down outrage as an instance of two distinct words
joined by a hyphen, which is the derivation given by Ash in his
dictionary, in strange obliviousness of the French word _outrage_.
P. 27 (1, 6). _T_ is omitted after _s_ in the second person singular
of the verb, and so no distinction is made between the second and the
third persons; thus, thou wrytes, and at p. 32 thou was, and thou hes.
P. 29 (7). The supposition that the apostrophe ’s as a mark of the
possessive case is a segment of his, a question which has been lately
revived, is here denied.
P. 34. In this last chapter on Punctuation, which the author styles
“of Distinctiones,” no mention whatever is made of the “semicolon,”
though it occurs frequently in the MS., as, for instance, p. 30, cap.
6. This stop, according to Herbert, was first used by Richard Grafton
in _The Byble_ printed in 1537: it occurs in the Dedication. Henry
Denham, an English printer who flourished towards the close of the
sixteenth century, was the first to use it with propriety.
P. 34 (6). The explanation of the mode of pronouncing the comma “with
a short _sob_” is odd.[5]
[Footnote 5: It will be here as well to mention that as the
punctuation in the MS. is extremely unsystematic, it has been
dispensed with whenever the meaning was confused by it.]
The author continually uses a singular verb to a plural noun; for
instance, “of this we, as the latines, hes almost no use” (p. 22),
though on p. 20 he writes, “in our tongue we have some particles.”
With regard to the Manuscript, there are two corrections in it worth
noting. At p. 10 (6), in the phrase, “the auctours _whole_ drift,” the
word had been originally written _hael_, but is marked through, and
_whole_ substituted for it in the same handwriting. At p. 21 (4), the
word _frensh_ has been inserted before _exemples_, but has been
afterwards struck through.
The numbering is wrong in three places, but it has not been corrected.
At p. 8 there are no sections 12 and 13, at pp. 17, 19, there are two
cap. 7, and at p. 19 there are two sections 4.
GLOSSARIAL INDEX.
[The words in the present Tract that really required to be glossed are
but few; I have, however, inserted in the following list most of the
variations from ordinary modern usage, in order that it may serve as an
Index.]