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etymology - Why "English" but not "Anglish"?


Etymology of English from Etymonline:



Old English Englisc (contrasted to Denisc, Frencisce, etc.), from Engle (plural) "the Angles," the name of one of the Germanic groups that overran the island 5c., supposedly so-called because Angul, the land they inhabited on the Jutland coast, was shaped like a fish hook (see angle (n.))




"Old English" article from Wikipedia:



Old English (Ænglisc, Anglisc, Englisc) or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southern and eastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century.




Also, Anglish is used as a resulting language of linguistic purism. (coined by the author and humorist Paul Jennings). It is mentioned as English minus many of the non-Germanic elements.



Questions:



  • Why didn't the name of the language become Anglish and survive till today?

  • Etymonline says that it comes from "Englisc" but there are three different spellings of Old English and the root is mentioned as Angul. So why from Englisc but not Anglisc?



Note: There is this question asked before: Where did the name "English" come from?


Accepted answer mentions that English is the corruption of Anglish. But there is not much detail about it. Is it ever called Anglish then? When and how is it corrupted?


Also, English is "Anglais" in French. I'm not sure if it is beyond this website if I ask why it is "Anglais" in French and if connection to other Germanic languages is related to this topic. The topic can go deeper in regards to origin of tribe names also. I may have missed some points and this can be asked in linguistics stackexchange as well.



Answer



In the journey from Old English to what we write today, the ash (Æ) tended to metamorphose into a simple E and various "ae" forms got reduced to just "e": Ælfwyn became Elvin, Æthelræd became Ethelred, aether and aesthetic became ether and esthetic (except when @Cerb spells them), and so on. The distinction was simply planed off over the centuries. When there was no need for the superfluous Æ (because its sound was rendered with a single letter) it got dialed way down in frequency. The same thing happened, more or less, with the thorn (Þ, þ) and eth (Ð, ð) characters, because the th digraph supplanted them.


An even more obvious influence involved the printing press. In the early days of typography, fonts were imported from Germany and Italy, and those countries did not use the oddball English characters, so substitutes had to be found. "E" substituted quite nicely for the ash, and "Y" for the thorn (as we see on the signs in front of all those cutesy Ye Old Whatever shops).


Elaboration


Asked for citations, I lazily looked to the Web first, but real scholarship in this matter is difficult to Google. Here are some not-stringently-academic citations, together with a disclaimer.



The thorn was particularly popular as a sign for 'th' in Medieval English, but with the advent of printing came a problem. There was no thorn sign in the printing fonts, as they were usually cast outside of England. So, since the sign for thorn slightly resembled the lower-case 'y', that's what was substituted.


The thorn continued to be used, but printing caused its eventual demise from the English alphabet. As mentioned earlier, lingering proof of its existence hangs on in the outmoded 'Ye'.
Thorn — Missing Letter of the Alphabet (reposted with correct glyphs here).





Ultimately, the letter was abandoned when printing began to streamline the alphabet and eliminate unnecessary letters. Æ was separated into AE, and the language moved on. However, you can still find ash used stylistically in names like Encyclopædia Britannica and ÆON.
Mighty Markup.




Disclaimer: I feel it only fair to point out that the reference books I have at hand (printed versions, so no linky-link), suggest that the ash (or æsc in OE), was pretty much gone by 1250 due to the influence of Norman French. This was a couple hundred years before the invention of the printing press, so we cannot accept that as the proximal cause. Still, Gutenberg almost certainly put the nail in the coffin of that and the other oddball characters (including wynn and yogh — look those up for your amusement and edification sometime).


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