Ugh... Covid, the gift that keeps on giving. Every day brings a new surprise. I mean, I'm lucky I didn't get it that badly. I was still able to get on with chores and so on. I don't know what variant I got. I'm assuming omicron. Anyway, the first day I got a nasty headache and a mild cough. Like I said, my 15 year milk allergy cough was way worse. This wasn't even as bad as a normal cold cough. The headache was awful though. It was stabbing pains in my temples, and shooting pains down the centre of my head, and then stabbing pains at the back. The next day from when I woke up, I could smell puke all the time. Later in the day it changed to a vinegary puke smell, then just rotten vinegar. Things smelt and tasted normal, though. This only lasted a day, because the next day I lost all sense of smell, and I still haven't regained it. Most food tastes okay, if slightly off, but I have gone off carrots.

Then I started getting stabbing pains down my sides.

I keep getting light-headed spells. The stabbing headache is gone, though my head does feel weird a lot of the time. If it wasn't so cold, and the garden wasn't covered in pigeon muck, because my family seem to think the patio is a giant bird table, I'd sit outside and see if the fresh air helps. I can't actually leave the house until next Monday. Maybe I'll see if I can muster the energy to go to the park. I've been feeling lethargic. Not in the way you do after recovering from flu, I'm just feeling mentally fed up and not wanting to do anything.

I say that but I have actually done a full timeline for my AD&D world. Over 7,000 years of history has now been documented. Yay me. Basically, I've been doing anything except working on chapter 6 of Dreamsong. I did start it. I have about 8 sides of A5 written. And it's definitely better than my first draft.

But lately I've been interested in the evolution of English. I got a random recommendation for Simon Roper's London accent through the ages video I think it was last year, and I was hooked. Recently, it's been bugging me that Eddie and them have a surname that sounds too much like my screen name. I wanted a name that sounded forest-y. And I thought of the Latin sylvanus, from which I got Silvana. But it does sound too much like Silver and I don't like it. And then I had the brainwave of, since Edward and Alfred's names were inspired by mediaeval royalty, why not go all the way and turn them fully into Middle English speakers?

So I've been working on fleshing out their culture, even though it doesn't really matter all that much since most of the story is set in Evalor and the Valley. So they are now speakers of something between Middle and Modern English (Common). That makes more sense than them being able to speak Common fluently, as their cultures have been separated for over 1,000 years, so even if they did start out speaking the same, dialectal changes would have happened over that time. And since Uncle Ed can speak Seraphene from his time in Kawashima, the communication difficulties can get reduced even more.

In terms of fashion, I was going to go for Viking influence, but somehow 18th century Treasure Island-type styles just seems more them. I kinda wanna put Uncle Ed in one of those tricorn hats. So Melacca is now based on the Phoenician culture, instead of generic desert, which was too similar to Feralia, and Xanþos is based on ancient Greece. Yeah, you might have noticed that cool letter there. That's the letter thorn, þ, and it makes both kinds of th sounds.

So I'm bringing it back for Eddie's culture. There's another letter, eth ð, which is actually the same as the þ. There's a misconception that þ is a soft th, like in thin, and ð is a hard th, like in the, but that's not true. They both do the same thing. It's like Irish, where the surrounding letters determine whether it's hard or soft (or voiced or unvoiced, if you prefer). The same applies to other letters, like f being an f or v sound, depending on what's around it. So the new surname I chose for the princes is Ǣfenfȳr, which means "evening light" in Old English. And the first f is a v sound, and the second is an f sound. And y isn't pronounced as you think. It sounds like the French u sound, or the Finnish y sound. But in this case it has an accent so it's different again. Anyway, I like both þ and ð, so for the sake of this fantasy setting, I am in fact going to do it the wrong way, and they will be soft and hard respectively. It's not really going to come up except in the royal family tree. I'm also bringing back wynn, ƿ, the original letter w. So Edward becomes Eadweard and Raven becomes Hræfen, but once they assimilate into Evalor culture, they go by the local Common (ie Modern English) spellings.

So back in þe olden days, English was phonetic. People who complain about English spelling being stupid actually don't know the spelling is fine, and it's people's tendency to change the way they speak that's to blame. I love the old way. I've been playing "Guess the faux-Old English" with Tiny, where I pronounce modern sentences using old and middle English rules. "The neighbours' light is too bright. There are three trees outside mine house." And she's surprisingly good at it. I guess phonics has some use after all.

Anyway, if you find this as fascinating as I do, here are some videos and resource. Fill your boots!

• Simon Roper's channel
• Old English Online
• Old English to Modern English Dictionary
• Speaking with a mediaeval peasant — Part One | Part Two — Even though Simon says the pronunciation isn't accurate (well, who really knows anyway), these are great to watch. I eagerly await part three!