History of English #40 (21 Mar 2014): Learning Latin and Latin Learning
Previously the Roman Catholic traditions officially won over Irish Celtic, but Irish Celtic stayed alive, especially in Northumbria. And a king shortly after some of the previous kings built a particularly important monastary in that tradition. It had a lot of books, that was a thing for important monastaries. A child (~4yrs) named Beade went to stay there, no one knows why: “orphan” and “noble child” are possibilities, with some evidence for the latter being that the name meant “prayer” in Old English so it might have been intended from birth.
A few years later a plague hit, and only Beade (now 12) and the abbot survived. They kept doing services, but it meant Beade mostly grew up with a lot of books, and became an accomplished scholar. He wrote a bunch of books of his own, most of them are lost to us now but we know about the others through a list in one of the surviving ones. At least one of them was a history, and Beade was pretty groundbreaking in trying to be accurate. He also included dates, and he was the first to start numbering from Jesus, instead of the previous thing of dating by Roman emperors. He wrote in Latin (so we have AD instead of something more Saxon—I guess BC came later?) but was a proud Anglo Saxon, and a few centuries later someone translated his works into Old English.
Some etymology: “cross” comes from the torture and torture device, and gives us several obvious things like “crossroads” and some less obvious things like “cruise” (that one from another branch of IE). “Crisscross” is super old but its meaning has changed, originally it was a line of letters on a page referencing Christ, then came to mean the alphabet and then other things.
“Mass” (as in Church), “mission” (as in Church) and “mess” (as in mess hall) all come from the dismissal at the end of a service, and “mess” (as in messy) comes from mess-as-in-hall.
“Noon” is cognate with “nine”. Early sundials divided the daylight into twelve hours, so the ninth was around 3pm. There were prayers at that time. Later those prayers were moved forwards to midday, but still got called noon.
History of English #40 (21 Mar 2014): Learning Latin and Latin Learning
Previously the Roman Catholic traditions officially won over Irish Celtic, but Irish Celtic stayed alive, especially in Northumbria. And a king shortly after some of the previous kings built a particularly important monastary in that tradition. It had a lot of books, that was a thing for important monastaries. A child (~4yrs) named Beade went to stay there, no one knows why: “orphan” and “noble child” are possibilities, with some evidence for the latter being that the name meant “prayer” in Old English so it might have been intended from birth.
A few years later a plague hit, and only Beade (now 12) and the abbot survived. They kept doing services, but it meant Beade mostly grew up with a lot of books, and became an accomplished scholar. He wrote a bunch of books of his own, most of them are lost to us now but we know about the others through a list in one of the surviving ones. At least one of them was a history, and Beade was pretty groundbreaking in trying to be accurate. He also included dates, and he was the first to start numbering from Jesus, instead of the previous thing of dating by Roman emperors. He wrote in Latin (so we have AD instead of something more Saxon—I guess BC came later?) but was a proud Anglo Saxon, and a few centuries later someone translated his works into Old English.
Some etymology: “cross” comes from the torture and torture device, and gives us several obvious things like “crossroads” and some less obvious things like “cruise” (that one from another branch of IE). “Crisscross” is super old but its meaning has changed, originally it was a line of letters on a page referencing Christ, then came to mean the alphabet and then other things.
“Mass” (as in Church), “mission” (as in Church) and “mess” (as in mess hall) all come from the dismissal at the end of a service, and “mess” (as in messy) comes from mess-as-in-hall.
“Noon” is cognate with “nine”. Early sundials divided the daylight into twelve hours, so the ninth was around 3pm. There were prayers at that time. Later those prayers were moved forwards to midday, but still got called noon.