Talk:List of English words of Old Norse origin

Some of these words are in fact considered to be from Old English or another source, not Old Norse: adder, addle, apple, answer, ash (both), asp (the tree; the snake is from Latin/Greek), ant, ax/axe, arrow, nick, awl, and so on. Verify. James 007 02:09, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

'Ankle' presents a problem because the etymology is tangled up. It is generally considered to be from Old English (form given as 'oncleow' or 'ancleow'), but apparently influenced by Old Norse (form given as 'ankula' or 'ökkla') or Old Frisian 'ankel'. All these words are from the same Germanic source, and before Germanic, from the Proto-Indo-European root *ank. I'm going to erase 'ankle' from the list for now. James 007 04:08, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I got the original set by doing a search of the OED. In particular, I did a case-sensitive keyword search for 'ON' in the etymologies, then checked each result. Since this is time-consuming, I only managed to get a small subset of all the results.

--Johnkarp 06:41, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I don't mean to point fingers at anybody, I just want an accurate list. I give the benefit of the doubt to Old English, when my references say a word is from Old English. James 007 02:45, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This is an article I am able to substantially expand. If there is any objection to how I am formatting entries (e.g., adding the first known provenance of the word in English as per the O.E.D., Skeat's Dictionary of the English Language, et cetera), please let me know on my Talk page.

One question before I get back to editing, though (mostly directed at James 007): this is a list of words in English, so do you mind if I add words from Middle English in addition to Modern English?

- P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 01:06, 10 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Spellings

All spellings of Old Norse words are as according to my references; other references might have different spellings. James 007 05:04, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

'are'

This one is a real problem to isolate away from 'be' in the reference texts I have convieniently available here. The O.E.D. is annoyingly vague in tracing it. Skeat's Dictionary has some good data, but nothing that can be easily boiled down to what is apparently wanted to accompany the O.N. portions of the entries for this list. Björkman's work on borrowings into Middle English might have something, but I cannot find it right now (seems like it should, though). I am going to avoid doing anything with this word at the moment.

-P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 01:37, 10 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

'arrow'

Is the list supposed to include English words that are cognate with Old Norse? I figure the answer is 'no', but wanted to ask in order to be certain. It would make the list much longer, which would probably be a bad idea, and the list *does* say "of Old Norse origin", so I think this may be a foolish question. :) As an example of what I mean:

Proposed entry:

arrow

ör, plural örvar ("=an arrow") {possible cognate}

English provenance = c835 CE (as arwan, an early form of the word)

From the O.E.D.:

[OE. had two cognate forms, earh for arh:{em}OTeut. arhwo- neuter, and arwe for arhwe:{em}*arhwôn weak fem.; akin to ON. ör, örvar:{em}*arhwâ str. fem., and Goth. arhwazna from arhw (cf. hlaiwasna ‘grave,’ from hlaiw); prob. ‘the thing belonging to the bow,’ arhw being cognate with L. arqu-us, arc-us, bow. (Cf. OHG. fingiri:{em}*fingrio- the thing belonging to the finger, ring, f. fingar.) A rare word in OE. the ordinary terms being str{aeacu}l, and flá, flán, of which the former disappeared after 1200, the latter occurred in Scotch after 1500. But arrow was the ordinary prose word after 1000.]

(/end O.E.D. quote)

P.MacUidhir (t) (c) 02:29, 10 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

There seems to be quite many words that are mergers of Old English and Old Norse forms, making the exact origin hard to trace. 惑乱分からん 14:33, 15 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

July 5th: vigr: Both the meaning and spelling make "vigor" a more likely candidate.

No, vigor is from Old French, most Norse nouns ending in -r lack an -r in modern English. 惑乱分からん 18:30, 2 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Rune?

According to SOED, this was reborrowed into modern English from modern Danish, not Old Norse. (Wiktionary has it as a straight descent from OE run, which I think is incorrect.)

I've taken it out for now. Mentioning it here because I forgot to mention it in the edit summary. — Haeleth Talk 08:56, 15 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"alive"

I can't quite remember correctly, but I think the English "alive" comes from the ON "á lif". Someone who knows what he's doing should add that.