Happy Monday!! As always, today’s post if by Stephen Hall. Thanks, Stephen!
That’s sort of a misleading title, as it might lead one to anticipate a discussion of some secreted foreign correspondence, however, it actually refers to characters of the English alphabet, which are for all practical purposes obscured in the mists of time.
As I am sure the reader is familiar, there are certain characters, or more typically accent marks which denote different sounds than typical in various languages, typically for words which have come into the language from an outside source.
For example, the German language has the umlaut, a diacritical mark denoted by two dots over the vowel but in the German only ä, ö, ü receive umlauts. It is the only time when the German language incorporates a nasally sound like the French language.
There is also the esset, or eszett, written as ß, or sometimes a double s, also denotes a different sound often referred to as a long s.
In French, there are several important accent marks including the accent aigu (which looks like an apostrophe over the letter e), the accent grave (which appears as a reverse accent aigu but can appear over any vowel), the circonflexe (which is a caret over a vowel.
. . that’s the caret over your 6 key on your keyboard), the tréma (which appears as the umlautin German, but denotes a different meaning), and the cédille (which is the odd character that looks like a tiny backwards c under the c, ç). http://grammarist.com/french/french-accent-marks/
While you may be inclined to think that the English would not go in for such odd idiosyncracies, they too suffer from similar legacies to other modern languages which harken back to words coming from foreign languages.
Despite being composed of about 36% German, 33% French, and 20% Danish, the ever pragmatic English quickly dispensed with such frivolous and ostentatious affectations, for example, while retaining the double s spelling in a number of words they did not pronounce it any differently. (However, they do like their punctuation such as the aforementioned apostrophe which does not appear in the French language and was a matter of some controversy some years back in Quebec’s promotion of French over English.)
The English did retain two holdover characters in certain words of Latin and Greek origin well into the middle English and even occasionally making appearances in the modern English as late as the 19th century, and still remains in some, but not all spellings.
Those letters are the æ and œ characters, which are really simple conjunction of the letters a with e and o with e respectively, but change the pronunciation of the letter combination, much like Humphry Bogart in the movie Casablanca pronounces the ou in the word bourbon very distinctively.
Such ae combinations come to the English from Latin, though we have in modern times increasingly adopted the practice of mispronouncing such words, e.g. pronouncing Caesar as sē-zər. However, in modern English, many of the letter combinations have been simplified by dropping one of the letters, sometimes the former, sometimes the latter.
There are a number of words which employ or employed the æ such as: æther, æsthetics, dæmon, and mælstrom, which become ether, esthetics, demon, and maelstrom respectively. While words like ether and demon simply dropped the a, maelstrom retained the original spelling probably because of its infrequent use in modern language, and then people will vary using esthetics or aesthetics.
Other words, more frequently from the Greek than the Latin, employ the œ character. Most people are familiar with the name Oedipus, which in early editions appears as Œdipus. Some words likely have at one time or another employed the œ character such as subpoena, poems, and even poesies, though I lack proper evidence to assert such affirmatively.
The point of all of this is not the evolution of language, but to set the stage to discuss a unique employment of the latter of these letters, œ, by one Adam Smith to make an important distinction regarding economic concepts in his work, The Wealth of Nations.
When discussing the wider political ramifications of moral philosophy upon the wealth and productive capacity of a nation and its interactions with the laws, professor Smith would refer to the “political œconomy”.
He would always be careful to preface œconomy with the adjective political to distinguish that he was discussing a general state wide condition.
In contrast, he would use the spelling economy, when referring to the influences and decisions of individuals within the society, and likewise would always preface the word by the adjective “personal”, referring to the individual’s “personal economy”.
When he used the word economy it was almost always nearly synonymous with the word efficiency.
Professor Smith used the difference between the spellings of economy with the œ and the e, further distinguished with the adjectives “political” and “personal” to really discuss two different but related concepts of capitalism from the perspective of the nation and the individual.
Understand at that time the very word “economics” had not yet been applied to his field of study, which would be adopted from a rival group of philosophers from France.
This concept would, by later economists, be rediscovered as the modern fields of macro-economics and micro-economics. They would think that their prefix designation was a unique and novel distinction which subsequent economists would further separate into distinct fields of study.
However, these concepts were originally denoted simply by the use of an obscure seldom used letter in the English language by Mr. Smith.
So I guess there are really two points to this post.
First, that concepts are often and easily lost to history only to rediscovered, probably only to be lost again sometime in the future. Ideas have an odd way of disappearing from public awareness only to be rediscovered.
Second, that it is amazing how hard it often is to express and articulate some concepts in a manner that other people will not only hear but understand. I applaud Adam Smith’s ability to create such an important distinction while retaining the fundamental philosophical connection through a mere variant in spelling employing but an archaic disused letter of the English language.
I can only hope to one day possess such eloquence as he could find in æ and œ.
