ACADEMY OF SAINT GABRIEL REPORT 2207 http://www.s-gabriel.org/2207 ************************************ 09 Feb 2001 From: Judith Phillips Greetings from the Academy of Saint Gabriel! You asked us whether the name would be appropriate for a woman of Anglo-Norman descent living in Somerset County, England, in the period from 1200 to 1400. Here is the information we found. is a variant of a name that often appears in medieval English records in the Latin form . (The spoken forms were a bit different, as we'll discuss later.) The name was fairly common in your period thanks to the popularity of the romances of Tristan and Isolda [1]. Unfortunately, we believe that it is highly unlikely that the spelling was used in England in your period [2]. We found many spellings of this name in actual records from France and England, but none combined the letters and . We found the following forms of in England in your period: Isolda 1200, 1219, 1273, 1314-16, 1317, 1346, 1379 [4] Isouda 1214 [4] Iseuda 1214 [4] Isaude 1379 [5] Isod 1379 [5] Isot 1379 [5] Isota 1327, 1369 [4] Ysolt 1201, 1204 [4] Ysout 1200 [4] Ysoude 1186-1210 [4] Ysewda 1268-9 [6] By the 14th century was probably the most common vernacular (spoken) form of the name [1]. It was pronounced roughly \ISS-@t\, where \@\ stands for the vowel spelled in and . This pronunciation was definitely found in Somerset, where the name was recorded in 1327 [5]. (The final <-a> was added to the written form to accommodate the requirements of Latin grammar.) Thus, would be an excellent choice for the second half of your period. The situation in the 13th century is more complex. The available citations suggest that the name still had the various Old French pronunciations that were probably current in France at the time. Spellings like and the partly Latinized suggest a pronunciation very roughly like \ee-SOAT\, while and appear to represent the Old French pronunciation of . This is a little difficult to describe in terms of English pronunciation, but it might be represented roughly as \ee-SEHWT\. To pronounce the sounds represented here by \SEHW\, start to say the word , but replace the final \l\ sound by a \w\. Finally, the citations suggest that at the very beginning of your period an old-fashioned pronunciation \ee-SOHLT\ was still to be found. (Here \OH\ represents the vowel in the word .) We did find the spelling , as well as , , , and , in period French versions of the Arthurian romances [7]. However, we don't think that these would be the best possible historical recreation for your persona. First of all, these spellings made up only a small minority of the forms of the name in these documents. Second, we found them only in France, and only after the split between French and Anglo-French; in your period, the French spellings of names no longer had much influence on the English spellings. Finally, the