Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould.

  • George M. Gould
Date:
1900
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Suggestions to medical writers / by George M. Gould. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    169/196 page 165
    Paleography, and even graphology, are alluring studies, and the development of our handwriting leads one into a hundred bewitching by-paths. Taylor shows a little in¬ stance in the evolution of our sign for plus (-f) out of the Latin conjunction et. The sign — (minus) is probably a modification of M, the first letter of minus. There is strik¬ ing proof of the popular ignorance and misconception as to letters in the common use of the old English th, or thorn-letter. It is, says Taylor, “the survival of a Scan¬ dinavian rune which the Goths before they left their early home on the Baltic had obtained from the Greek colonies on the Euxine, centuries before the commencement of the Christian era. It proves ultimately to be derived from the Greek delta, which, after making the round of Europe by the northern seas, rejoined in England the other letters of the Greek alphabet which had come by the Mediterranean route.” It proves out that our letter y for the thorn-letter is a mere substitute of writers and printers for the thorn- letter. People who wish to appear as antiquarian or phil- ologic scholars, without giving themselves the trouble of learning a single fact to justify the pretense, constantly pronounce, even indite, imitation lines, in which the mod¬ ern printer uses ay for the old th. Every Fourth of July hundreds thus air their assumed antiquarianism by pro¬ nouncing ye as ye instead of as the. When the old printers could not “space out” properly, or had no type of the thorn-letter, they used y instead of th, and th was repre¬ sented by y in such words as ye (for the), yt (for that), yu (for thou), etc. In old medieval manuscripts are found : ve, yai, yair, yaim,yat, etc., and the words should be pro¬ nounced the, thai, thair, thaim (them), that. The alpha¬ bet of the Chinese is not properly an alphabet, but has stuck fast in the pictogram stage; it is composed of some 40,000 conventionalized pictures. All words are of one syllable, and position in writing, and accent in speaking give the grammatic relations and functions. The Japanese have advanced to a syllabary alphabet, but there stopped
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