The rhyming alphabet is undoubtedly the most well known part of the Primer. Most of you probably remember seeing some of the original wood-cut pictures in school. It is an admirable example of the basic premise behind the Primer--that the purpose of education is to advance knowledge of God.
Like most of the Primer, the rhymes changed somewhat through the years, as did the illustrations. The copy I was working from was the original, but I will endeavor to include as many different versions of the rhymes, with pictures, as I can find. The biggest surprise to me was the fact that in 1777, there were only 24 letters in the English alphabet. This is because (as anyone who has waded through the original type face knows), "i" and "j" were treated as the same letter, as were "u" and "v." A linguist could probably tell you if that's because they used to pronounce them the same. I imagine some pronounciations have changed, because that would explain why some of them really don't rhyme very well.
At any rate, I had to add two rhymes to complete the set, and so have no woodcuttings with them. Some of the illustrations are also surprisingly grim and unpleasant, which led to me excluding them from the volume I originally published. Here I will post everything I have though, including some illustrated pages I have been working on on my computer.
No comments:
Post a Comment