How do you pronounce the word Eorðe?

Answer 1

Eorðe is the Old English (O.E.) word for earth, ground, soil, dry land.

It is very difficult (impossible?) to know how people in ancient times really pronounced words. If the letter 'o' was actually pronounced when the word was spoken, perhaps the word sounded like aortha, or aorthé, or just orth, (or orthé) similar to a present-day Irish accent. Or if the first E should be pronounced like the 'e' in 'error', the word would sound like airth, or air-thé.

Linguists postulate that the word Eorðe came from ertho, a hypothetical prehistoric word that pre-dates all Germanic written languages. Would O.E. retain pre-historic pronunciations? Very doubtful!

Alternatively, considering that the Old High German word was erda, and from which Eorðe may have been derived, maybe Eorðe should be pronounced erda.

However, the O.E. letter ð (an eth, a crossed 'd') is generally reckoned to represent a 'th' sound (like the th in 'the') rather than a 'd' sound. This being so, perhaps the O.E. pronunciation was more like urth-uh (phonetic /ɜr-θə/, or ur-thuh), which is quite close to the present-day received pronunciations of the words earth or the personal name Eartha.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION: A variety of options have been shown, but there does not seem to be any way to know with certainty exactly how this ancient word 'should be' pronounced.

Whatever pronunciation(s) we finally decide upon, the fact that Old English was a language only from the fifth to the eleventh centuries, and that even current English regional accents also differ so much anyway, it is highly unlikely that there is anyone alive on earth at the present time who still uses Old English as their vernacular and who could consequently confirm our guesses!

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