--- mona striewe <mona@...> wrote:

> well, if you trace back the roots of common daily
> English words, as well as
> German or modern Scandinavian words, you' ll come in
> many cases to the same
> roots anyway. So, if a word in English, or its
> preceding form in Old
> English, looks quite similar to an Old Norse word,
> this can either mean it
> came as a word borrowed from Old Norse into English
> at a certain time
> (things like this happens often with words attached
> to certain things or
> techniques which are introduced to places where they
> were not know before)
> or it just means they share the same origin in very
> early Germanic times.
> Especially with everyday words related to household,
> cattle, tools, etc. you
> find a lot such words which are until to day very
> very similar all across
> the Germanic languages, from German to Icelandic.
> This does not mean they
> came to be borrowed from one language into the other
> at a certain point but
> just have common ancestors. This is by the way all a
> very interesting topic
> for long winter evenings with some big etymological
> dictionaries and a nice
> pot of tea :-)
> mona
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Haukur Thorgeirsson" <haukurth@...>
> To: <norse_course@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 3:38 AM
> Subject: Re: [norse_course] Old Norse in English
>
>
> > > What perent of the English language
> > > is rooted in Old Norse?
> >
> > I don't know and the question isn't really
> > well defined. Here are two suggestions for
> > better defined questions:
> >
> > 1. What percentage of the daily vocabulary of
> > English (say, the 2000 most common words) is
> > derived from Old Norse?
> >
> > 2. What percentage of the total dictionary
> > vocabulary of English is derived from Old Norse
> words?
> >
> > I don't know about the absolute percentages but
> > it is clear that the answer to question 2 is
> significantly
> > lower than the answer to question 1. Most of the
> "extended"
> > vocabulary of English is Graeco-Latin
> goobledygook.
> >
> > If you want my wild guess rather than your own
> then maybe
> > 10-20% for question 1 and 1-2% for question 2.
> (But even
> > those questions aren't very carefully defined.)
> >
> > There are certainly very many very common English
> words
> > derived from Old Norse. Words like 'take' and
> 'knife' and
> > even the pronoun 'they'.
> >
> > Kve<eth>ja,
> > Haukur
> >
> > A Norse funny farm, overrun by smart people.
> >
> > Homepage: http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/
> >
> > To escape from this funny farm try rattling off an
> e-mail to:
> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
> >
> >
>
>

whoa, so I could, theoreticly, read Beowolf, no sweat?

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