Bag beg big bog bug
Lately I’ve been doing some linguistic analysis because long ago in the olden days in the before times I majored in combined foreign languages and linguistics so I could find wordsound patterns
Here’s a game for you. I’ve made it up and now work on it a bit every day: Make a chart of 5 long vowel sounds ayy ee eye oh oo across the top
Down the left side you list the alphabet consonant sounds— not letters —then bl- br- ch- cl- cr- dr- any way you can think a short word starts
Now take a nice short Anglo-Saxony soundword like “ale” and go across the top to fill in or leave space ( ) for one-syllable words that use the 5 long vowels and end with the “L” sound.
Don’t google till you’ve gone through once with question marks (?) where you want to research later It doesn’t all have to be just right you can include Proper Nouns and slang it’s all good
AYY EE AYE OHH OO
ale eel aisle/isle/I’ll ( ) ( )
bale/bail ( ) bile bowl ( )
kale keel Kyle coal/Cole cool
dale deal dial dole duel/dual
fail (feal?) file foal fuel/fool
Gail/gale ( ) guile goal ghoul
hail/hale heal/heel ( ) whole/hole who’ll
You can try it out with short vowels too
bag beg big bog bug
And so on with any olde words you pick up patterns like scraps from quiltmakers
You look over a whole page and get the feeling some words were created by an old Anglo Saxon shepherd in the year 1065 using this grid asking
—Is the word sheep used yet?
—No says the gridchecker
—Oh then I’ll take that. How’s the word crop? Is it used?
—Aye tis says the gridchecker
—Ah I’ll use it anyhow to talk of my sheep cropping grass
—Canna ye use the word clipping as the men for kine an horses do?
—It’s a bit more o’ the cropping sound for sheep than the clipping t’others do
—Don’t use crop says the gridchecker Try crap in its stead
—No says the shepherd Crap’s what the sheep do the other end
—I tell ye crop is taken says the gridchecker It’ll get you in a mess of pain with the sharecroppers
—Don’t mind that says the shepherd They’ll learn to share
He turns to go then brings up another thing.
—Any road, have ye heard of young Kyle calling his riding stick a crop as well?
—He told me no such thing snorts the gridchecker An’ I told ye all to check the grid afore ye come up with a name for things
—Ah ye bureaucrat! the shepherd shouts
—Ho now. Bureaucrat. What’s that 3-beat beast of a word?
—I dunno the shepherd shrugs I just heard a Frenchman say it at the pub
—A Frenchman on our soil spouting fancy words! the gridchecker says Well he won’t last long