May 19, 2010

  • Learning Enghlish in the church...

    A while a go I asked pastor GvP about professing and confessing.

    We pro-fess our faith, and we con-fess our faith - we have two words but they are identical when it comes to the statement of faith; yet we con-fess our sins but we don't pro-fess our sins. It all comes down to faith: I don't understand it but I just have to believe that it is so

    Every Sunday we hear the Apostolic Creed, sung or spoken. Every so many weeks we read the form for the Lord's Supper or Baptism. Many times we hear the word "burried". Depending on the minister you will hear this word pronounced differently. In the congregation there is a large number of people that say it the way it is written. Yet, nobody pronounces "busy" the way it is written.

    What should we, ESL people, do: follow the left or the right, the wide road or go on the small path?

    I found this online.

    bur·y  (br)
    tr.v. bur·ied, bur·y·ing, bur·ies
     
    Word History: Why does bury rhyme with berry and not with jury? The answer goes back to early English times. The late Old English form of the verb bury was byrgan, pronounced approximately (büryn). During Middle English times this (ü) sound changed, but with different results in different regions of England: to () as in put in the Midlands, to () as in pit in southern England, or to () as in pet in southeast England. London is located in the East Midlands, but because of its central location and its status as the capital, its East Midlands dialect was influenced by southern (Saxon) and southeastern (Kentish) dialects. The normal East Midlands development of (ü) was (), spelled u.
     
    Because scribes from the East Midlands pronounced the word with this vowel they tended to spell the word with a u, and this spelling became standard when spellings were fixed after the introduction of printing. The word's pronunciation, however, is southeastern.
     
    Bury is the only word in Modern English with a Midlands spelling and a southeastern pronunciation. Similarly, the word busy, from Old English bysig, bisig, and its verb bysgian, bisgian, "to employ," is spelled with the East Midlands dialect u, but pronounced with the southern (Saxon) development of (ü), ().
    hm()

    Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.