Hi Gazariah,
Personally, I think using Pokorny is going a bit far.
That is because Indo Europan is not a real language,
but only "an imagined language".

Old English had its ancestor in Anglo-Saxon,
which again derives from a uniting of the Anglian
and Saxon dialects that belonged to the areas of
Jutland, Schleswig-Holstein and other regions in those
parts.

The trouble is that we don't have too many written records
of the languages of the Angles and Saxons. Hence the etymologies
often cannot go further back than to Old English.

If we say that "real" Old English dates from before William
invaded at Hastings, then French clearly is not in any sense
a part of Old English.

Still, English must have taken up some Norse words
during the period of the Danelaw. But if you say
that "real" Old English dates from before the 9th
century, then Old Norse is not a true part of
Old English either.

Old Norse, had "Proto Nordic" or North Germanic as its ancestor,
whereas Old English had West Germanic. Old Norse and Old
English belong to different branches of the Germanic language
tree.

Best regards
Xigung

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, <brahmabull@...> wrote:
>
> <<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.
>
> Gazariah