16-12-2020, 08:43 PM
Good thought, Koen. I'll have to find a source for this, but I'm fairly sure that Rosicrucianism (among other esoteric and mystical interpretations of the Christ story) tied the Five Wounds of Christ to a wider body of alchemical symbolism involving sets of five items. This is definitely something I want to look more into.
Also, this may or may not be relevant, but I learned yesterday that some versions of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" have AEIOU instead of EIEIO. I was unable to find any evidence that any of these versions are older, though. So the most parsimonious explanation is that AEIOU was substituted for the original EIEIO, to make this children's song a bit more meaningful and richer in educational value. In fact, some old versions of the song have the first line as "Old MacDougal had a farm in Ohio-hi-oh", and none of the known precedents from England have anything that could become EIEIO. But I'm still open to the possibility that the use of a string of vowels in song or verse, stripped of consonants and used as an abbreviation the way VViews and JKP discuss, could be the tradition which inspired both the AEIOU of "Lo Boièr" and the EIEIO of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm".
Also, this may or may not be relevant, but I learned yesterday that some versions of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" have AEIOU instead of EIEIO. I was unable to find any evidence that any of these versions are older, though. So the most parsimonious explanation is that AEIOU was substituted for the original EIEIO, to make this children's song a bit more meaningful and richer in educational value. In fact, some old versions of the song have the first line as "Old MacDougal had a farm in Ohio-hi-oh", and none of the known precedents from England have anything that could become EIEIO. But I'm still open to the possibility that the use of a string of vowels in song or verse, stripped of consonants and used as an abbreviation the way VViews and JKP discuss, could be the tradition which inspired both the AEIOU of "Lo Boièr" and the EIEIO of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm".