I was wondering could Earlette have become the equilavent of Earl instead of Countess?
Old English tended not to have female forms of titles; even the wife of a king was known as just that, his wife.
The word in question, 'cwen', came to only mean the king's wife; we spell it queen of course.
I was wondering could Earlette have become the equilavent of Earl instead of Countess?
-snip-
I think it would just be used by a son of a deceased Earl that has not yet become of age to inherit the title and lands.
If I might a tidbit: in Scots, especially northeastern, a 'quean' is simply a young woman.
That's intriguing!
And a bit confusing, like the ambiguous title "master" (expert craftsman or unmarried male).
The Normans didn't as such try to replace 'earl' with 'count'. The latter word is recorded from around 1300 but in Anglo-French, which was after all a different language to English and entitled to have its own vocabulary. It probably is true though that any chance it had of migrating into English and replacing 'earl' was snookered by its similarity to another word, first recorded around 1230 and still going strong today.
'Countess' for an earl's wife or a woman holding an earldom in her own right is known from the mid-12th century. Old English tended not to have female forms of titles; even the wife of a king was known as just that, his wife. The word in question, 'cwen', came to only mean the king's wife; we spell it queen of course. English is apparently unique among Indo-European languages in having a special word for a female sovereign or consort, as opposed to a feminised form of whatever word is used for king.
Other titles came to us with the -ess suffix, e.g. duchess, baroness. We didn't get kingess because queen had already developed as it had and because king was native in English rather than imported. Earless I suppose could have happened, but instead the feminine form of the equivalent title was imported to become the English term. The -et or -ette suffix is actually a diminutive not female ending. Had it for some reason been used to make the female form of earl, which it wouldn't have, it would have been earlet. The -ette variant tends to be used with imports from French from the 17th century onwards, earlier imports using -et.
Sorry for a long-winded and serious answer to a frivolous question, but I got interested. Some of the dates I gave may be a little off, sources often disagree as to exactly when a word began to be used, but won't be wildly out.