Oh You Medieval Scribes! 0 ▲ Danny Bate 1 hour ago · 11 min read2167 words · Writing · hide The letter swap responsible for worried wolves, lovely honey, and some monkeys. One of the many skills that Yorkshire folk have over southerners like me is that they can rhyme something with wolf. In my accent, wolf is a lone word, with no partners in rhyme. In northern England, by contrast, the flavours of English speech are united against the widespread ‘foot–strut split’, and so maintain one vowel in bull and gull, put and putt, and wolf and gulf. North and South nonetheless do agree that wolf doesn’t rhyme with golf – despite their shared spelling. The latter, a word of Scottish heritage but of ultimately unclear origin, seems sensibly spelled. Golf suits its letter O, just as you might read and write in dolphin. Wolf wears its spelling awkwardly; you can find the same vowel at the heart of bull and full, only there represented by a U. Wolf is one way into a very different period in the history of English, albeit one responsible for an orthographic oddity that we’ve maintained to… Commenting on Bubbles has been removed. Why? If you want to talk about this post, write to the author, use the comments on their blog if it has them, or reply with a "RE:" post on your own blog. Suggestions? feedback@bubbles.town
