Where did the e on the word "olde" come from?

Question

Seamus Heaney explained the origin during a seminar once, and I don't remember what he said. Thanks for any help.

What were the meanings of the suffixes? You sound vaguely familiar, but I think I'm looking more for the meaning of the suffix. Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

i found an answer.. i think!

it seems from this article that english was originally an easy-to spell language, spoken by all. but in the course of history, the french gained control of england, and french was the official language. english ceased to be a written language, and became strictly an oral one, which you'd expect if only peasants used it. eventually, the english gained control again, but had to re-discover how to 'write' english all over again, but had only latin rules to go from. thus the "e" and other oddities.

fascinating the role history plays in linguistics!

later, royalty

Answer 2

Many words in Middle English had suffixes to indicate various grammatical concerns, and gradually these dropped off. Later, sometimes they were spelled that way but the ending was not pronounced.

Answer 3

"Olde" is the Middle English spelling. The e is there because they pronounced it. (The word rhymes, roughly with "Golda".)

The ending itself is one of the few endings OLD English used with nouns and adjectives to mark gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), number (singular or plural) and "case". Case refers to the FUNCTION of the noun in the sentence -- whether it is the subject, direct object, etc.

Through the centuries or Middle English these endings became simplified and eventually many of them ceased to mark anything at all. They were still pronounced for a time, but the syllables they were in were not accented so even that sound wasn't very strongly pronounced. Finally, they stopped pronouncing it altogether.

-e is one of the most common of these endings. Others include -(e)s -- which you can still see in the POSSESSIVE ending - 's - and -en, which you find in some adjective forms, such as olden, golden, woolen, wooden, earthen, leaden. . .

If it helps, here is a nice discussion of "case" and case endings in Old English.
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/resources/IOE/case.html

Here is some more discussion of the various endings that survived into Middle English.
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/MENounMorphology.htm

And this link includes an explanation of the sound changes and loss of case endings
http://www.ielanguages.com/enghist.html

By the way, the loss of case endings starts in the NORTH of England and is probably more due to Scandinavian influence, NOT Norman French.

Answer 4

He can have been named after the Waters of Mormon, which have been identified for his or her purity. "More well" may be very near in that means to purer. Although the written language of the Nephites used to be derived from the Egyptian, there is not any direct correlation for the spoken language of the Nephites. Most of our modern day prophets have provided their reviews on quite a lot of topics, however they have got by no means claimed to be infallible, or to have a superb talents of all matters. Joseph used to be no specific.