Mind your language
A FOOTNOTE on the Queen Mother, but first: 'Someone whose opinion I respect,' writes a reader from Johannesburg, 'claims that the word few is Old English for the number eight. Can you help, please?' All I can say is, do not give up on respect. But I cannot think what this business is about. The Old English for 'eight' was ahta, or aehta or eahta or, in Northumbrian, aehto. It is closely related to octo in Latin and okto in Greek.
The Old English for `few' was feawe, or feawa, contracted as fea. These are plural forms, as makes sense, and the singular is not recorded in Old English. Some people have said that more recent phrases such as lewe porage' is a survival of the singular usage, but in reality porage ('porridge') was being used as a plural word. Anyway, few in English is related to pauros in Greek and paucus in Latin, which also has the cognate words paulus ('small') and pauper (poor).
It looks pleasantly neat to me. If anyone can make anything of this claim for eight and few being connected, perhaps he could let me know. Talking of unfounded ideas, I read amid the coverage of the Queen Mother's life and death — which was as full of errors as a bun is full of currants — that she invented the very title Queen Mother. Not so. Samuel Pepys, among others, used the term. A devil of a time I had finding the passage in his diary referred to by the Oxford English Dictionary, for it is cited by page and volume in an edition which no one uses now that the paragon of publishing edited by Latham and Matthews is available. I wondered if it was a mis-transcription till at last I found it in the entry for 21 January 1665:
Mr Posy carried me to Somersett-house and there showed me the Queen-mother's chamber and closet, most beautiful places for furniture and pictures; and so down the great stone stairs to the garden and tried the brave Eccho upon the stairs.
Good for Pepys. (There is another reference on 20 March.) This was the king's mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, widow of Charles I. The Queen bit refers to the status of the mother rather than the status of her child. Charles H's queen, Catherine of Braganza, had a mother alive too — Luisa, who was busy in Portugal. She is referred to by Pepys as 'the Queen's mother'; and he notes on her death that Catherine could not be informed until she had finished a course of physic.
Dot Wordsworth
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