Suppose you are in the monastery of Canterbury, in the year 890, during the reign of the wise and illustrious King Alfred. You’re a visiting scholar from York, and you don’t know your way around. But there’s a bright young fellow who seems familiar with the place. “Hwaer is ðæt boc-hord?” you ask him, which means, of course, “Where is the book-hoard?” Don’t you love Germanic compounds? The book-hoard is the library. When the boy hesitates, because it’s not everybody who has permission to visit the boc-hord, you say, “Ic eom lareow, ond ic wyll sume spel-boc raedan.” Which means, “I’m a teacher,” though I’d really like to render it as “I’m a lore-master, and I want to read a certain spell-book.” A spell-book? What’s that? A book of charms to chase the pixies away? What the weird sisters in Macbeth looked into, to find “Spells to fool an ambitious man so he destroys himself”? “Oh, dearie, I’ve found one!” says weird sister number 1: “Double, double, toil and trouble!” “That’s a good one!” says sister number 2. “Good! Good!” laughs sister number 3, and they all join in, shrieking.
Or is a spell-book a book to teach you that the h comes before the w, but the r comes after? Hardly! A spel-boc was a book of sermons!
Is that a surprise? Not so much, if we think of the word gospel, which comes from Old English godspel, meaning good news, good tidings — and that’s how spel came also to signify the preaching of that good news. How fine were those monks when they translated words into Old English! For the word evangelium means just that: it’s the good tidings.
The Old English verb spellian, built from the noun, meant to speak, to talk, in the principal sense of telling a story or issuing a proclamation. If you went to the spellstow, the spell-place, it was to hear the news. That’s related to that other meaning of spell, which is what magicians lay on you: it generally has a negative meaning, or at least slightly suspicious, as when you are under someone’s spell, but on the other hand, if you are listening to a fascinating story, or if you hear the ringing tones of truth from a preacher of rare ability, you may be spellbound, and that’s not bad at all — assuming, as I say, that the preacher is uttering the truth.
So how did our word come to mean what drives little kids crazy, that is, to put the letters in the right order so that they spell out sieve and receive rather than seive and recieve? That’s an odd story in its own right. We know that French is a daughter of Latin, so it’s a sister language to Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian, but the Franks who first lived in what’s now France spoke Frankish, which was a Germanic language. And a lot of words entered French from Frankish. So it was with Frankish spelon, which was pretty much the same word as ours, but as a part of the French language, it changed its meaning over the centuries, to mean to explain, rather like the sense in our phrase, “To spell it out.” So when the Normans invaded and brought their words with them, they brought the now French verb espeler, and the two words merged. How do you set a word in order? You spell it.
Is English spelling crazy? I don’t think so, not really. French is a lot harder: think of the word Août, meaning August, the month. How do you say it? “OO!” Welsh is more sensible than French, but we English readers aren’t used to some of their ways, so that we see a word like tywyllwch, and we say, “You’ve got to be kidding!” But the problem there is that they’ve got ll for a sound we don’t have in English — a voiceless l — and they’ve got ch for a sound we’ve got only in Scots English, the hard h sound in Loch — and they use w for a vowel, a really pronounced and rounded oo. So it’s tywyllwch! — meaning, darkness.
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