*This is a transcription of my notes and discussion board posts from my class for the first project. This page in under construction.*
For my project, I chose to look at the word “ghost,” written in Old English as “gǣst.” This is a word that was inherited from Germanic. In Old English, the pronunciation of gǣst is similar to g-is-t, with a hard G sound. While most earlier and variant versions of ghost do not have the gh, the gh appears to have come from Middle Dutch during the 1500s. The meanings of the word ghost are all relatively the same referring to a soul or supernatural being, or being likened to one. There is one definition meaning “breath” or “blowing” that started in Old English but became obsolete by 1500 ce.
Shakespeare has used the word ghost on several occasions, but one notable time is when he said “That affable familiar ghost Which nightly gulls him with intelligence” in Sonnet 86, published around 1609. This is an Early Modern usage of the word after the gh was introduced in the 1500s.
I think it is also interesting to note that there was a spike in frequency of the word in 1890, then again in the 1920s and 30s. On an annual basis, the word is most commonly used in the October-December months, most likely to be attributed to the holiday season with Halloween (spooky spirits) and Christmas (the religious “Holy Ghost”).
In Modern English, the word is pronounced g-oh-ss-t. The g is a hard sound, similar to good. The center o is similar to the oh sound in “oh no.” The word ends in st, similar to the ending of angst. The Old English form, gǣst, is more similar to gist, except with a hard g sound similar to modern pronunciation of ghost rather than a soft g of gist.
The Old English form, gǣst, eventually turned into gaast or gast in Middle English. Middle English had several variations including gaste, goest, goist, gosthe, and igaste. Middle English varied in spelling a great deal. Middle English is where the modern spelling is first seen amongst these other spellings. The OED also includes information about the Scottish spellings. Pre-1700 the spellings are very similar to the Old English spellings, but diverged greatly in the 1800s. It became guest and gase.
My chosen word, ghost, is a Germanic word. Derived from the same Germanic base word as Old Icelandic and Gothic, an older version has been reconstructed in Proto-Indo European, connecting it to Sanskrit and Avestan. In Old English, the spelling started as gǣst, similar to the cognates (Frisian) gāst and (West Frisian) gaest. It became gast, goost, and ghoste in Middle English.There is an influence on the Middle English spellings from Middle Dutch gheest as that is the only cognate with the h that carries into present day ghost. In Early Modern English, it is seen as ghoast, becoming ghost in Modern English.
Ghost is a Germanic word in origin. The original spelling in Old English is gæsð, where the æ makes an “a” sound like in cat and the ð is a “th” sound like the. Focusing on the æ, this changed over time due to the Great Vowel Shift, making the vowel turn from æ to aa in an early version of Middle English gaast, then into o in gost, a later Middle English spelling. When assimilation of the Middle Dutch spelling gheest occurred, the h was included in the word ghoste. Over time, the h being present created an overcorrection of pronunciation to “g-host” (g-ho-st).