Questions tagged [old-english]
Questions dealing with Old English, i.e. the language of the Anglo-Saxons up to about 1150.
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Alternatives to "knowledge" and "gnosis" for words meaning "science" but with Germanic or Greek roots? [closed]
What are the closest synonyms for science with Germanic or Greek roots?
Knowledge (Germanic) seems too shallow, and gnosis (Greek) too mystical.
user160641
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How did English end up with names for days of the week like Monday, borrowed from Latin but then also translated?
Learning about the origin of English names for days of the week, I found it curious that some of them had an original meaning borrowed from Latin, but the words themselves were a translation. So ...
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What did English use before "triangle"?
Apparently the word "triangle" was borrowed into English in the late 1300s. Triangles are a very common shape in everyday life, and there were certainly English-speaking craftsmen and artists before ...
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What's the longest word that has survived from Old English?
I recently saw this question Did the "We shall fight on the beaches" speech mainly use words from Old English? If so, why? about Winston Churchill's famous "Fight them on the beaches" speech ...
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Origin of -(e)s in present indicative third singular
I'm aware that it comes from a Northern dialect of Middle English as in:
He sing(e)s
With the full Northern conjugation being:
Ik sing(e)
Þu/ou sing(e)s
He sing(e)s
We/ye/they sings
...
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Silent "e" at the end of words
Back in 2009, a job interviewer sent me a link to a web service that would help me make a free telephone call via the internet... Skype. As a native speaker, I knew "instinctively" to pronounce this "...
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Do Old English dialects correspond well with modern English ones?
I came across this article the other day. At the bottom there's a family tree of English dialects, both extant and extinct ones. It makes it out that southern English dialects came from Wessax English,...
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When was the "do form" introduced in the English language? [duplicate]
The following might be standard textbook question, but not being a native speaker I am unaware of the origin.
In ancient English, as well as in other Germanic languages, questions were posed ...
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Why did Old English use C while other Germanic languages used K?
During most the first millennium CE, North and West Germanic languages were written in runic alphabets. Gradually, each language shifted from the runic alphabet to the Latin alphabet. The people who ...
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Latin words borrowed from Roman occupation?
English has a lot of words borrowed from Latin. The great majority were borrowed in the 14- and 1500's from Church/Medieval Latin, a huge influx via educated neologism.
I'd like to know if there are ...
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When was "it" first used in weather sentences? [duplicate]
It is raining.
It's a sunny day.
I hate it when it rains.
I'm prepared if it snows.
It can be mighty cold at night! ... etc.
My questions:
When did English speakers start using "it"...
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How are Old English participles declined to English participles? (both present and past)
I'm trying to learn about differences between English and Old English, and I found that there are some noticeable differences in the use of participle markings. I think that participles were declined ...
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The meaning of the MIDDLE ENGLISH "nother"
Very specific expertise is required here.
The schoolmaster "shall not teche his scolers song nor other petite
lernyng, as the crosse rewe, redyng of the mateyns or for the psalter
or such ...
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Conventions in Old English for use of thorn and eth
Somewhere I got the naive idea that, in Old English, thorn represented the unvoiced "th" sound and eth represented the voiced "th" sound. A little digging has suggested to me that each of the ...
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'lest': How did 'less that' evolve to mean 'for fear that'?
lest, conj. = [OED] Etymology: Old English phrase þý lǽs þe , lit. ‘whereby less’
= Latin quōminus
(þý instrumental of the demonstrative and relative pronoun + lǽs less adj. + þe ...
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For 'also', how is ' the demonstrative sense of "similarly" weakened to "in addition to" '?
also (adv.)
Old English eallswa "just as, even as, as if, so as, likewise," compound of all + so. The demonstrative sense of "similarly" weakened to "in addition to" in 12c., replacing eke. [...]...
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How did "but" mean "only"?
but (adv., prep.) : Old English butan, buton "unless, except; without, outside," [...]
I don't know Old English. From the étymons overhead, how did but change semantically to mean
but |...
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How did 'of' change semantically from 'away, away from, off'?
of (prep.) [⇐]
Old English of, unstressed form of æf (prep., adv.) "away, away from,"
from Proto-Germanic *af, [...], from PIE *apo- "off, away" (see apo-). Primary sense in Old English still ...
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Single word for "how many" [closed]
Is there a way to say "how many" in a single word? (even something in Old English should be good enough)
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How did 'against the outside' (without) evolve to mean 'outside'?
without (adv., prep.) [<--]
Old English wiðutan "outside of, from outside," literally "against the outside" (opposite of within), see with + out (adv.). [...]
I am guessing that here, the ...
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How was the letter -u- written in Old English?
I was reading the etymology for 'come (v.)' when I encountered:
[...] The substitution of Middle English -o- for Old English -u- before -m-, -n-, or -r- was a scribal habit before minims to avoid ...
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Did the English call a fruit “openærs” for 700 years?
There is a small apple-tasting fruit called medlar in English. It looks like a cross between an apple and a rosehip.
It has two main curious features: first the fruit must be bletted before it can ...
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What is the grammatical designation of "that" in "...that she may have..."?
The following sentence is the Modern English translation of a line from the Old English poem Judith:
He (God) advanced a gracious favour to her, that she may have a steadfast faith.
My question ...
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Has the English language changed since 1854? [closed]
I've started reading a book named Walden, published in 1854. I am not a native English speaker, I am Persian, and I want to read this book for two reasons:
to improve my English and because I think I'...
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Is English considered easier to learn than most of the other languages in the world? [closed]
In comparison to the other languages, I think English is much more simpler. For example, compared to French, English nouns have no gender, adjectives have only one form and verbs have extremely simple ...
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Is this a 'justified' double negative? The answer may require some Old English knowledge.
The following is is my translation of a sentence from Bede's Account of the Conversion of King Edwin. Old English tolerated the double negative, and I am trying to translate the text in such a way ...
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Is It Correct to Say ‘I Care Not’?
I was watching the film ‘The Devil’s Violinist’ (which takes place a long time ago) when I noticed the following sentence in a dialogue:
I need not and I care not.
Here, need is used as a modal ...
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Is the -old morpheme in 'threshold' an OE locative?
I remember in days of yore being told by a professor that threshold held the meaning of "stepping (or more literally, treading) through," implying a locative sense to the remaining -old morpheme. This,...
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What is this letter/symbol called?
I found it in an old dictionary and I'm not sure what it means. It looks like the number "3", but the top of the three has been flattened(and slightly curved).
I've only seen this in three ...
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What happened to voiced velar fricative [ɣ] and velar approximant [ɰ] in English language?
The voiced velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in various spoken languages.
Wikipedia says that it is not found in English today, but did exist in Old English.1
Why did this sound ...
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Etymology of orchard
Etymology of orchard
As a German I would assume that orchard is related to German Obstgarten (a garden with fruit trees), and as Obstgarten has a consonant group of four consonants bst+g the bst was ...
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Split infinitives—did Old English have them?
I've read a few articles as well as questions on this site about splitting infinitives. In the Wikipedia article, it claims:
In Old English, infinitives were single words ending in -n or -an (...
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Meaning of the phrase 'out upon it'
I came across this phrase twice while reading the play Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare in the following contexts:
1 - "Out upon it old carrion, Your flesh rebels at these years?". A ...
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Byname or patronymic names for daughters?
Bynames in various texts and genealogies include the suffix -ing to indicate the son of. Example would be Cynric son of Cerdic written as Cynric Cerdicing.
Was there a similar practice for daughter's ...
user97339
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How did *Old* English transform into *Middle* English so quickly?
Anglo Saxon Old English was the most common language in England before the Norman invasion. To the modern eye, it is unintelligible without specialist learning:
lange þrage; &...
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Did the Tironian "et" ("⁊") have any impact on the ampersand being shift + 7 on English keyboards? [closed]
How did 7 come to be an abbreviation for 'and' in Old English? is a beautiful question about the Tiroian "et", which is now the "⁊" character 1.
My question is what impact did the association of this ...
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How did 7 come to be an abbreviation for 'and' in Old English?
According to A History of the English Language: Revised Edition by Elly van Gelderen, p.53, in Old English the numeral 7 was used as an abbreviation for the word and:
Abbreviations are frequently ...
user28567
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Etymology of certain words ending in "-en"
Tchrist's comment here on my answer to an etymology question brought the following to mind:
Ox (from Old English oxa) maintains the same vowel in the plural oxen that it has in the singular. But ...
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What did Old English use Ꝥ for?
Here are some examples of citations in the OED of Old English where they use a standalone crossed thorn, Ꝥ:
Þu aclænsast Ꝥ weofod and ʒehalʒast.
Þær after com swulke mon-qualm Ꝥ lute hær ...
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Do the words with non-palatalized pronunciation of g/c ("get", "give") always have a Germanic origin?
In English, ge/gi is sometimes pronounced as [ge]/[gi], but mostly as [dʒe]/[dʒi]. The second form is explained as palatalization in the topic
What is the origin of the different pronunciations of C ...
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'Parasitic' Phonemes
In searching for the reason for the message -> messenger shift, I came across the theory of the 'parasitic n.' Essentially, the idea is that during the post-Norman Conquests period in England, ...
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How to pronounce "gemænscipe"?
I'm not sure if Old English counts here, but I can't find the answer to this anywhere.
How would one pronounce gemænscipe? I believe it's Old English for "community".
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Why "English" but not "Anglish"?
Etymology of English from Etymonline:
Old English Englisc (contrasted to Denisc, Frencisce, etc.), from Engle (plural) "the Angles," the name of one of the Germanic groups that overran the island ...
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Why are words like "Thou" / "Thee" / "Ye" no longer used in English?
When going through old English literature, especially stories and poems, we can see they have been full of words like "thou" and "thee" and "ye".
Some of my English ...
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Answering a negative question with one word
There has been talk of how to answer a negative question without ambiguity, most often with a qualifying phrase needed for clarification. (For example, "yes, I do"/"no, I don't.)
I've noticed that ...
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Where can I find information about the history of the study of Old English? [closed]
I'm curious about when the English, in early modern period, first found out about texts such as Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon chronicles and realised it was an old version of English? Or did they always ...
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Why don’t “snow” and “plow” — well, or “plough” — rhyme? [duplicate]
They (sometimes?) have the same ending when spelt but don’t rhyme when said. Why is that?
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/ð/ → /d/ shift in English
As a result of a /d/ → /ð/ shift, fæder became father, hider became hither and togædere became together, giving us our modern English forms.
However, I know that murder and burden have archaic forms- ...
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Are certain English words cognates to Old English words?
For example, the English word spoor comes right from the Afrikaans spoor, meaning trail or track. This is from an identical Dutch word which is descended from the Proto-Germanic *spurą, from which ...
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English words of Latin origin: Did they replace existing words?
According to Wikipedia, the Latin influence on English builds more than half of its vocabulary.
The same source furnishes a percentage of 26% for words of Germanic origin.
Although I can easily ...
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