<<One thing that quite frequently leaves me very disappointed, although
this may be a bit off topic, is when an etymology is given for a word
in a dictionary (either standard or etymological) and the etymology terminates
at Old English. Now I am no authority on Old English, but I was under
the impression that no word can just begin in Old English seeing that
the language was formed from German, Norse, French, Latin, or Celtic.
I assume that people living in Anglo-Saxon Enlgand didn't just go walking
around making up names for things. I assume the words were passed down
from another language. Usually the etymology says "from Middle English
. . . from Old English." Perhaps the etymologist just leaves it there
meaning that the word comes from the Anglo-Saxons bring it from Northern
Europe. Am I right or am I way off?>>
A dictionary of the English language will ordinarily trace words back
to the earliest periods of English usage. The Oxford English Dictionary
has entries only for words that occur in Middle English or later, alhtough
Old English will be cited in the etymologies wherever relevant. Dictionaries
in everyday use contain only words used in Modern English.
As somebody pointed out, Old English did not take most of its words from
Old Norse. The two had a common ancestor, and the bulk of the words came
from that stock. However, once OE and ON were differentiated, and Norse
"visitors" began calling in England, a substantial number of words
did get borrowed from ON into OE. We can only trace these when the development
of common stock was different in OE and ON.
The American Heritage Dictionary does a specially good job with etymologies.
Every word is traced back as far as possible, and there is a separate
listing of every Indo-European root that shows up in an English word.
So the {fer} in "infer" is traced back to Latin, and from there back
to IE {bher}, and that same IE root is traced for OE 'beran', "to bear."
To get farther in, you need to look at Pokorny's dictionary, which traces
every known IE root in all the IE languages. Pokorny is a weighty tome,
devoted solely to etymology, and shows why your desk dictionary cannot
trace words back to the limites of philological knowledge.