|
?:reviewBody
|
-
Just after Christmas Day in 2020, a 26-year-old Scottish postman named Nathan Evans posted a video to TikTok that captured him singing the folk song Soon May the Wellerman Come: Evans' effort kicked off something of a craze for TikTok users to post videos of themselves singing similar catchy tunes that belong to a class of folk song known as sea shanties (SHAN-tees) -- work songs performed to accompany (rhythmic) forms of labor on ships in the days of sail: However, to many English speakers exposed to the term for the first time, sea shanty looks wrong -- it should be chanty, they think, to reflect that the word refers to verses that are chanted. This belief might have some validity in a strict linguistic sense, as the word is believed to be derived from a form of the French verb chanter, to sing. However, it is not the case (as often happens with linguistic borrowings) that shanty was originally spelled differently (e.g., chanty), and a corrupt or wrong spelling of the word eventually became the norm. The oldest known print references to sea shanties, from the mid-19th century, employed both the 'sh' and the 'ch' spellings, so neither was an original form that was later changed to something else. (And educated guess might be that the 'ch' version was faithful to the spelling of the original French root word, but the 'sh' version was a rendering of the French pronunciation of that word in English orthography.) In fact, the spelling of shanty has never been consistent in English, having been rendered variously as shanty, chanty, chantey, or (less frequently) shantey. The Google Books Ngram Viewer shows shanty as the far most common form over the last few decades: This is one word that you can render in any of four different ways and still be correct, so all you aspiring singers can focus on your performances of these traditional sailing tunes and not worry too much about how to spell them.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}