Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 3.djvu/395

 10'- 8. HI. APRIL 29, 1905.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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ii. 22), and regarded it as correct, he gave no reason why we write England and say Jngland. I have always regarded what might be called the literal pronunciation as attributable to German influences, and in a daily paper some months ago contemporary German custom was invoked to prove that the sound of eng in "England" should be that of eng in the words length and strength. But the custom of saying Inglish is as old as the eleventh century at least, for the dispossessed English who entered the service of the Emperor of Constantinople were known as Ingloi (see Cobbe's ' Norman Kings of England,' 1869, p. 31). In the fifteenth century Capgrave, and perhaps other writers, even spelt the word with an /, and the place-names Englefield and Ingle- field are certainly identical. At the present day, too, the Spaniards and the Italians call us Ingles and Inglese, respectively. The ancient and widely-spread recognition of the

Eresence of the short i in our national name as not been accounted for, I believe ; and as the assertions of would-be purists who will some day make the words " any " and " many " rhyme with " zany," because of the spelling have not yet been met, I should like to see the question ventilated, and a true reason given if the one I beg leave to advance is unsound.

In the 'Traveller's Song,' which was written about the middle of the fifth century, and which has come down to us in the ' Exeter Book,' a MS. of the eleventh century, we read of an Offa who ruled over a country called Ongl, Ongel, or Ongle (we only have the dative " Ongle," 1. 34), and who won a battle against the Danes " bi Fi-fel dore." The MS. has bijl fel dore, which probably stands for bi Wilheles ore. This victory established the boundaries of the Engle and Swsefe. The latter people were ruled over at a slightly earlier time by a prince who is called Witta by the Traveller (cf. PROF SKEAT'S remarks about Witham, 'N. & Q., 10 th S. ii. 538), and we read of the two peoples again a little further on in the same poem. Now this close connexion of Swabian" and English in the fifth century reflects i condition of things affecting the same peoples in the second century. Ptolemy, in his notic of Germany (II. xi. par. 15), tells us that the 2ovij/?oi 'Ayyei'Acu dwelt to the east of th Longbards, and on the river Albis. Now the Angeil-oi can be no other than

I do not pretend to determine what Ok Teutonic vowel ci represents, but I assum that it was one capable of causing i-umlaut and that it was not the vowel u, whicl

appears in the supposed etymon angul, onguV, and which could not cause that infection.

The Greek Angeil-, then, represents the-

early form of the words Ongl-, Engl-e, ^Engl-e,

and the two latter forms must be cases of

lidden umlaut. Ongle, if the tradition of

he MS. is correct, does not exhibit umlaut,.

ind may be an Old-Saxon form. Compare

'Gdtum'' and "Geatum," which are respec-

,ively Old- and Anglo-Saxon, in the same

)oera. Angel-iheoiv, the name of the son off

he Offa just now referred to, has resisted both

i infection and darkening of a into o (see the

3 arker MS. of the 'Saxon Chronicle,' so*.-

A..D. 892, ed. Plummer, anual 755, p. 50). So,

too, has the Old High German Angil-breht.

The recognition of the presence of an i in- Between the O.-S. Ongle, which dialect did' not adopt z-umlaut, and the A.-S. Engle,. in which dialect it was prevalent ; but it does not explain the representation of a by both e- and ce. The former is the proper representa- tive of i-infected d, ce being merely the A.-S- wavering of d But here we are assuming bhat a was short, and there are two reasons For believing it to have been long originally. The first is the fact that if we mark it long, we get a consistent explanation of all the phenomena ; the second is the occurrence in some of the poems of Taliessin, a Welsh bardi who wrote about the end of the fifth century and the beginning of the sixth, of the word Eingyl to denote the Angles of Bernicia. Now ei is a long vowel in Welsh, whether it is the infection of d, as I believe it to be here, or whether it is the Cymric repre- sentative of an O.-S. d. If, then, we mark the a in Angeil-oi long, we are able to solve- the problem as follows.
 * he second syllable explains the variation-

The O.-S. Ongle had 6 for d, and refused infection before the vowel of the second syllable dropped out. The A.-S. ^Engle, on the other hand, was infected before it lost the i of the second syllable The A.-S. e* occurs now and then irregularly for <, which appears as umlaut of d in certain verb forms. The sounds of e and ce are represented in Middle and Modern English by ee and ea; compare fet, " feet " ; d eel, " deal " ; taelig, " seely." But the tendency to shorten the vowel ee has apparently always been present, and this long vowel sometimes becomes like- i in sin, instead of remaining like ee in seen. The A.-S. dejmn, for instance, has become- "dip"; scelig, seely, have become "silly"; and- the tendency is still operative, for we say grin for green in Greenwich, as well as britches and pritty. It would seem, therefore, that an original.