Tom's Opinion

Well I’ve been shown another example of how the modern population takes things for granted. You know things like pen ink and paper.
Listen to this. Apparently in the days of old (about 1000 years ago) ink and paper, well not paper exactly that didn’t come about until a little later out of China, but parchment were extremely expensive. So the monks in their scriptoria were very hard pressed to save on materials. So they would invent short cuts to their words.

They ended up putting a little hat on certain vowels that were followed by an ‘s’. So the French verb ‘être’ was actually ‘estre’ but they had to shorten it. This is directly evidenced by the name of the Cistercian monks. They were founded near the town of Saint-Nicolas-lès-Cîteaux. Note the spelling of Cîteaux, its not Cisteaux because the name got shortened in texts and on maps etc. Cistercian in the spoken though was preserved.

So there you have it, monetary limitations on the literate and highly educated classes helped form the Romance languages. Cool huh?

(Ah the good old days when the intelligent shaped society…)

This entry was posted Thursday, October 18th, 2007 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Main. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.