But there are many words whose changes of form cannot be altogether explained by any of the influences that have been discussed in this and the preceding chapters. Why should cervelas, "a large kind of sausage, well season'd, and eaten cold in slices" (Kersey's Eng. Dict., 1720), now be saveloy? We might invoke the initial letters of sausage to account for part of the change, but the oy remains a mystery. Cervelas, earlier cervelat, comes through French from Ital. cervellato, "a kinde of dry sausage" (Florio), said to have been originally made from pig's brains. For hatchment we find in the 16th century achement, and even achievement. It is archaic Fr. hachement, the ornamental crest of a helmet, etc., probably derived from Old Fr. achemer, variant of acesmer, to adorn. Hence both the French and English forms have an unexplained h-, the earlier achement being nearer the original. French omelette has a bewildering history, but we can trace it almost to its present form. To begin with, an omelet, in spite of proverbs, is not necessarily associated with eggs. The origin is to be found in Lat. lamella, a thin plate,[101] which gave Old Fr. lamelle. Then la lamelle was taken as l'alamelle, and the new alamelle or alemelle became, with change of suffix, alemette. By metathesis (see p. [59]) this gave amelette, still in dialect use, for which modern French has substituted omelette. The o then remains unexplained, unless we admit the influence of the old form œuf-mollet, a product of folk-etymology.
Counterpane represents Old Fr. coute-pointe, now corruptly courte-pointe, from Lat. culcita puncta, lit. "stitched quilt"; cf. Ger. Steppdecke, counterpane, from steppen, to stitch. In Old French we also find the corrupt form contrepointe which gave Eng. counterpoint—
"In ivory coffers I have stuff'd my crowns;
In cypress chests my arras, counterpoints,
Costly apparel, tents and canopies."
(Taming of the Shrew, ii. 1.)
in modern English replaced by counterpane. Mid. English has also the more correct form quilt-point, from the Old Norman cuilte (pur)pointe, which occurs in a 12th-century poem on St Thomas of Canterbury. The hooped petticoat called a farthingale was spelt by Shakespeare fardingale and by Cotgrave vardingall. This is Old Fr. verdugalle, of Spanish origin and derived from Span. verdugo, a (green) wand, because the circumference was stiffened with flexible switches before the application of whalebone or steel to this purpose. The crinoline, as its name implies, was originally strengthened with horse-hair, Lat. crinis, hair. To return to the farthingale, the insertion of an n before g is common in English (see p. [84], [n. 2]), but the change of the initial consonant is baffling. The modern Fr. vertugadin is also a corrupt form. Isinglass seems to be an arbitrary perversion of obsolete Du. huyzenblas (huisblad), sturgeon bladder; cf. the cognate Ger. Hausenblase.
Few words have suffered so many distortions as liquorice. The original is Greco-Lat. glycyrrhiza, lit. "sweet root," corrupted into late Lat. liquiritia, whence Fr. réglisse, Ital. legorizia, regolizia, and Ger. Lakritze. The Mid. English form licoris would appear to have been influenced by orris, a plant which also has a sweet root, while the modern spelling is perhaps due to liquor.
FOOTNOTES:
[89] Sack, earlier also seck, is Fr. sec, dry, which, with spurious t, has also given Ger. Sekt, now used for champagne.
[90] Fr. chaise, chair, for older chaire, now used only of a pulpit or professorial chair, Lat. cathedra, is due to an affected pronunciation that prevailed in Paris in the 16th century.
[91] The fact that in Old French the final consonant of the singular disappeared in the plural form helped to bring about such misunderstandings.