We all have knees. Many of us have knots – in our fences. Few of us have missing ‘k’s in our titles. But 1500 years ago a member of a royal band would have been a ‘cniht’. In Anglo-Saxon society Jesus’s disciples were referred to as cnihts. But the ‘c’ or ‘k’ went missing and the spelling became easier. And so today when a member of the House of Commons, e.g. is knighted, he gains a ‘k’.
This kind of change is not without its problems. Some of us have nicknames. Here we have a word that is a result of a mis-spelling. Early on such a person would have ‘an eke name’, that is ‘an also name’. The word became wrongly divided. into ‘a nick name’. Eke names became common. Lloyd George, for instance, had one. They called him the Welsh Wizard. T.H. Huxley, who gave us the word ‘agnostic’, was known as Darwin’s bulldog.
English spelling has its vagaries. It is a minefield for newcomers. The arrival of dictionaries regularised the wordscape but it had its limitations. The missing ‘k’ is a minor hazard compared with the vast range of words involving ‘ough’, ‘augh’ and the pronunciation thereof. English spelling remains bizarre, inconsistent. New words bring new problems. We have to relearn our language – to cope with program, for example, or barista.
‘Christianity’ came into the language as a nickname. It might have taken the vernacular form ‘Christianisme’ after the French style or Christentum after the German. Whatever the development, it is noticeable that the New Testament writers did not use the word ‘Christian’ or anything like it to describe the religion of the new covenant. The nickname, however, stuck. It came to seem indispensable.
Whatever the linguistic origins, the faith itself has anchorage in the Scriptures of Judaism and the New Testament documents. The imperfections of the alphabets concerned and the idiosyncrasies of the vernacular rapidly shaped the linguistic pattern of something for which no words had been provided. The cnihts became disciples (from the Latin) and apostles (from the Greek) and the word ‘church’ or ‘kirk’ came into view in the vernacular as the Lord’s property (from kuriakon belonging to the Lord).
If our spelling (not to mention other aspects of the language) is so disorderly, should we reform it? This is almost like asking whether we should reform human nature. The upheaval is immense to contemplate. Any benefits will be hard-won. George Bernard Shaw did his best to get something done – and failed. Perhaps we should accept that we fallen creatures deserve our fallen language and have a duty to make the best of it.
HIGH KIRK
St Giles’s church, Edinburgh is often called St Giles’ Cathedral. This is not surprising: it has been Episcopal and Presbyterian in the course of its history. The proper name is St Giles’, High Kirk. It is the mother church of Presbyterianism.
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