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Correction: This should not read TO Holy Mount but FROM Holy Mount. Continuing ... Make a cuppa! Moving on into the next period of development, Middle English (ME) roughly 1100 – 1450 AD, England suffered a new invasion, this time from the French-speaking Normans. William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 but it was many years before the effects of the invasion were seen in the language because, despite being in power for over 300 years, the French were never able to establish their language as the language of the nation. There appear to be two reasons for this. Firstly, unlike the Anglo-Saxon invaders, the French never quite managed to outnumber the Anglo-Saxon population so Anglo-Saxon English remained strong as Joe Bloggs continued to speak and write his Anglo-Saxon dialect. Secondly, the class division that came, and grew, with the invaders meant that the Normans, mostly aristocratic, and the Anglo-Saxon hoi polloi didn’t rub shoulders with each other to any great extent. The language barrier was certainly one reason but the class barrier was probably greater. While the language remained strong it developed neither unity nor standardization. In fact, the four dialects of the Old English period, far from becoming a united English language, developed instead into ‘five’ dialects as the Mercian dialect area, expanded southwards and quickly developed two different dialects: West Midland- and East Midland. This happened because the language had developed in two different directions – the East under Danelaw and Viking Influence, the West under the rule and influence of King Alfred. With the French aristocracy now the new ruling class the key positions in many institutions went to Normans and this situation, with French dominating in positions of power, lasted for a couple of hundred years allowing the language of the aristocracy to also become the language of the corridors of power, the arts, the church, the military, law, medicine, the seats of learning, the royal court and anything else of importance. Eventually, with English no longer being the language of the upper class, culture and administration, the West Saxon dialect lost its footing in those domains. This resulted in there being no common standard in English and, having no standard, people spoke and wrote in the dialect of their own region. This is not to say that the Norman invasion did not have some influence on the development of the English language. Probably the most noticeable influence of the Normans, described by Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1999) was the 10 000 French words which entered the language at that time, mostly within the domains outlined above: prison, army, music, grammar and sculpture, to mention just a few. They came in through the penthouse, as it were, and filtered down to us in the basement and most of them are still with us. On a more day to day note, the Normans even left a trace of their daily lifestyle with words such as: spice, salmon, tart (of the edible type), veal, venison and, at the other end of the alimentary process, excrement - the latter causing the relegation of the Anglo-Saxon scytel - pronounced sheetel - (s-h-i-t) to the ranks of the vulgar where it remains to this day. History reflected in language! Further French influence is seen in the changes to both spelling and pronunciation of the Anglo-Saxon’s Old English. And it’s here we can see some evidence of development in our words Holly, holy and mount. Spelling was already somewhat chaotic after the Roman scribes introduced the Latin alphabet, padded out with a few symbols from the runic alphabet to emulate all the sounds, but if you’re looking for the reason why English spelling can use the same ‘ou’ spelling for so many different sounds as in rough, cough, tough, though, thought and through then look no further! It’s here that many of the rules and oddities of modern English spelling have their beginnings - because the Normans had their own ideas about spelling the sounds of English. They removed the runic symbols and replaced them with Latin letters and spelling changes were slowly introduced to show the different pronunciations of long and short vowel sounds– that’s to say, the difference between the short sounds in spat, bet, fit, lock and pull compared to the long sounds of spa, beet, fight, look and pool. In Old English the letter representing these sounds would have been the same for each pair, (a, i, e, o and u respectively). Some earlier scribes had begun to represent the sound difference by placing a horizontal line above the vowel letter to indicate that the sound it represented was long but the Norman scribes introduced, very early, a new system of differentiation. Long vowels got an extra vowel letter while short vowels were followed by an extra consonant letter giving words like looc and locc (look and lock). This system, with some modification, is still in use. It is this change that is responsible for the double ‘l’ in Holly as the OE word, holegn, got an extra consonant letter, i n this case ‘l’ (hollegn) – to show that the ‘o’ was short. Later in the period, as the ‘hockle’ sound disappeared, the letter ‘g’ was no longer needed in the spelling, leaving the word hollen (or sometimes hollin). This alternative spelling shows us that the last vokal may already have been pronounced 'ee' as in' been'. Now we are beginning to see a better resemblance to the word Holly and we can see that the short vowel sound is retained throughout the transition from holegn through hollen to Holly. (CODEE) Even the OE munt (mount), probably pronounced with the same short vowel sound as in 'pull, seems to have been had some sort of revival possibly through the Norman French spelling, mont (OCDEE), bringing us nearer to its present day spelling. Scholars seem uncertain as to which of the two words went on to become ‘mount’. But Barber seems to err on the side of munt becoming mount as the Middle English spelling of the short ‘u’ sound of munt was often later spelled with ou or even ow , with the addition of a second vowel letter showing that the sound was clearly the same as it is today. However, the first recorded evidence of the present day spelling is from the sixteenth century. What happened to the Old English word halig? Was it at this time that it became holy? I’ll tell you about that in a day or two and then we can move on and apply what we know to Bedlington’s Hollymount.. To be continued …..