Anne no fan of West Ham
QUESTION Was Anne Boleyn imprisoned in a castle in Green Street, East London?
GREEN Street House was a 16th-century mansion nicknamed Boleyn Castle because it was rumoured it was where Henry VIII courted his second wife, or that she was imprisoned there.
However, it was not built until at least 1538, two years after Anne Boleyn was executed in the Tower of London.
Green Street in the London Borough of Newham is the boundary between East and West Ham and is best known as the location of the Boleyn Ground, home to West Ham United from 1904 to 2016.
The street name preserves the title of the old hamlet Grenestrete or Grene Lane c. 1527, that is ‘the green and grassy hamlet’, from Middle English.
The land on which the Boleyn Ground was built belonged to Stratford Longthorne Abbey from 1135.
The Abbey was ransacked during the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII in 1538. The land was handed to the King’s favourite, Richard Breame, who built Green Street House, a crenellated Tudor palace, some time before his death in 1546.
It became a Roman Catholic school from 1869, when the gateway was demolished and the land was developed.
In the early 20th century, it was a maternity home and the grounds were leased to West Ham United. After the house was damaged during the Blitz, it was demolished in the Fifties.
Bill Allen, London E14. QUESTION
How did Italians process milk to make fabric?
IN THE Thirties, Italian chemist Antonio Ferretti devised a method to extract fibres from casein, a protein in milk.
This could then be used to make material with properties similar to wool. This new milk fibre was dubbed Lanital — a compound of lana, meaning wool, and ital, from Italia.
Wool is a protein so, on a molecular level, it has a similar structure to casein. Ferretti’s Lanital process began with adding acid to skimmed milk to separate out the casein, which was then dissolved in a solvent until it developed a viscous consistency.
It was forced through a spinneret device, emerging like spaghetti, passed through a chemical bath to harden it and then cut into fibres of desired length.
In his push for Italy to achieve economic self-sufficiency, dictator Benito Mussolini promoted the production of Lanital.
Further impetus was given following League of Nations sanctions imposed on Italy in response to the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
Production was handed over to SNIA Viscosa of Milan, which was then the world’s second largest producer of rayon.
However, Lanital didn’t wash well, smelled like sour milk when damp, and was prone to rotting.
It was soon replaced by newer synthetic fibres such as acrylic, which were cheaper to produce and more durable.
Laura Sykes, Newmarket, Suffolk.
QUESTION Why are weak and speak pronounced with an ‘ee’ yet break and steak have an ‘ay’ sound?
THE pronunciation of words in English has more to do with the way they entered the language than with their spelling. Though the words weak, speak, break and steak may follow a similar rule of spelling, with the ‘ea’ pairing, they are pronounced differently.
This is due to their transference from their original language into Middle English, a sort of linguistic halfway house, and then into modern English. Many words in English come to us through Anglo-Saxon or Norse, mainly Danish. Though both Germanic in origin, the languages diverged considerably before arriving on our shores.
Steak is more closely related to the word stick. Its origins were the Norse
steik meaning roast meat. This probably evolved from steikja, to roast on a spit, which may have evolved from steig, meaning a pointed stick — which is a spit in its most basic form.
It’s the origin for the word stake, so there is no surprise over the pronunciation of two words that may have the same origin, but different spelling.
Similarly, break has its origins in Old Frisian, another Germanic language. This was a dialect spoken on the Frisian Islands, which form a chain along the Dutch and German coast.
It was originally bregh, pronounced brake. As that word already existed in English, it is possible the spelling came about as a way of differentiating the two, copying the example set by stake and steak. Brake is influenced by the Dutch word braeke and the French brac.
The word weak came to us from the Norse veikr, via the Dutch week, pronounced vayke. However, there was already an English word week, meaning a period of seven days.
At what point the second ‘e’ was changed to an ‘a’ can’t be identified, but once again, it may have been to differentiate between the two words.
Speak comes from the Anglo-Saxon word spechen, which is a direct relation of the German sprechen, meaning to speak. It was probably the same word originally and lost the ‘r’ when it evolved into Middle English.
Why it should be pronounced to rhyme with weak, rather than steak, is a mystery, especially as one of its derivatives is the archaic and Biblical sounding spake.
Its roots would suggest that it should rhyme with speck.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh.
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