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There are so many words in the list that are not exclusively North Germanic, but also exist in e.g. German, such as "wing" (German: Schwinge) etc.
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)
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)
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)
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:
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)
July 5th: vigr: Both the meaning and spelling make "vigor" a more likely candidate.
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)
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. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.36.68.189 ( talk) 21:23, 8 April 2007 (UTC). editing live performance like ginger fox number one — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.147.114.221 ( talk) 15:20, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
Wyrd, the source for weird, does not come from Old Norse, but is genuine Old English. The Old Norse form of the word is "urðr".
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=weird has the details.
Several other words on this list are wrong as well, the spelling of the Old Norse words especially. They are maybe spelled like they have been spelled on some occasions, but they are not spelled according to the system of spelling Old Norse that is in use nowadays.
These are common in old Danelaw areas of the east Midlands and north of England. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Willhdavison ( talk • contribs) 21:55, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
The Danish for valley, is dalen, so I can't see Dale being Old English as Dale only occurs as place name in parts of England's Danelaw, such as the Derbyshire Dales near the Danish settlement of Derby! or Yorkshire dales, you don't get it in the south of England which had no Danish settlement. This may come as surprise to people who don't actually come from where modern English developed, which is England not America, but the word dale to describe a valley, fell to describe a Hill, is in common every day use by millions of people in England.
As for doubts about "by" see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/conquest/after_viking/legacy_vikings_02.shtml Which states "Examples are easy to find, with names such as Grimsby ('Grim's homestead'), Thurnby (either 'homestead near a thorn-bush' or 'Thyrne's village'), and Derby ('village near deer') still very common. Grimsby, much as it is today, was likely to be a place of trade and fishing. Thurnby and Derby were probably agricultural villages, where the Vikings made a living for themselves in their new land." The word Derby is in common use in the US, UK and Australia, so I think you can say its a English word of Old Norse origin.
On http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/conquest/after_viking/legacy_vikings_05.shtml it says "The English we write and speak today owes its origins to a mix of the London and east Midlands dialects." and goes on to say "Given that the East Midlands dialect itself was, in origin, a mixture of English and Scandinavian (with French thrown in for good measure), the impact of the Viking invasions remains very much with us today. We still speak a version of English that was born on the borders of Mercia and Danelaw." The Danelaw was not uniformly settled. Danish colonists congregated more densely in some areas than in others – in particular in Yorkshire and the East Midlands in Lincoln, Stamford, Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.
Daughter is also missing from the list 78.146.14.103 ( talk) 18:15, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
I have edited the Ragnarök entry to correct some mistaken translations (namely "Twilight of the Gods", which is not the translation), but I wonder if Ragnarök even belongs on this list since it is not an ON-derived word, but a word which is used only in reference to the mythological event in Norse mythology for which we have no English equivalent word.
136.242.107.85 ( talk) 00:26, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
On the main page, some of the words are in a darker blue than others. What is being indicated by this?
We owe alot as English people to our northern brethren in both culture and genealogy 86.144.66.152 ( talk) 21:20, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
I removed a large chunk from the intro because:
Anyway, I don't think there's anything salvageable from this removed text, but for the sake of posterity and fairness, I'll post it here.
Ufwuct ( talk) 16:16, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
References
seems to be two issues here, the "a" part, and the "loft" part. the a- prefix, does that come from Norse or was it already in English? (see also on this page alive, and i didn't even check for others) does "a-" separated move the word that should be listed to "loft", and then we also have to explain the words "loft/lift" vis a vis German "luft". Any reason to think any of this is Norse into English, or just everybody is Germanic? 68.174.97.122 ( talk) 18:29, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
In addition it appears there are quite some words that appear to be of common Germanic origin rather than taken from Old Norse, especially some of the more frequently used words such as guest, loan and loose. Vandepoel~enwiki ( talk) 12:05, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
According to the OED, the word 'auk' is an original Germanic word, with cognates in Swedish and Danish, derived from Old Norse. This sounds as if this means it is not actually a word English took from Old Norse, but a word we had originally.
The entry on "bug" derives it from "búkr" and glosses it as "insect within tree trunks". However, "búkr" means "belly, abdomen" so the semantic connection here is unclear to say the least. Worse, the linked page on the online etymology dictionary does not support the claim but rather points to Celtic sources. (I've only been able to go back to 2017 with the wayback machine, and the link is dated 2010 so things could have been different.) Incidentally "bock" (he-goat) is used in Swedish to refer to certain wood-boring insects (husbock - house borer) but here the explanation given by svenska.se is an analogy between the antennae and the goat's horns. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.224.188.19 ( talk) 14:58, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Many words are not exclusively North Germanic, e.g. words that you find in German (and this only a selection):
band, birth, both, crawl (= "krabbeln"), eider, gan (German: Gang), gift, girth, give, guest, hail, how, knife (special tool: Kneip), knot, lathe, loan, loose, plough, reindeer, rib...
And so on
In other words: This list is higly misleading! 84.58.204.55 ( talk) 14:32, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
My understanding is that "hustings" referring to loci of electioneering is of Icelandic origin. House thing? Thing in this context appears in Althing, the Icelandic parliament that has many appearances in the Icelandic sagas. But I'm not expert enough in any of this to add it to the article. Larry Koenigsberg ( talk) 06:33, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
one source??? really? this is ridiculous. a mis-take comes from 'mistaka' ? really? how reliable is this page? Stjohn1970 ( talk) 02:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)
This article is rated List-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
There are so many words in the list that are not exclusively North Germanic, but also exist in e.g. German, such as "wing" (German: Schwinge) etc.
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)
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)
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)
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:
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)
July 5th: vigr: Both the meaning and spelling make "vigor" a more likely candidate.
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)
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. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 128.36.68.189 ( talk) 21:23, 8 April 2007 (UTC). editing live performance like ginger fox number one — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.147.114.221 ( talk) 15:20, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
Wyrd, the source for weird, does not come from Old Norse, but is genuine Old English. The Old Norse form of the word is "urðr".
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=weird has the details.
Several other words on this list are wrong as well, the spelling of the Old Norse words especially. They are maybe spelled like they have been spelled on some occasions, but they are not spelled according to the system of spelling Old Norse that is in use nowadays.
These are common in old Danelaw areas of the east Midlands and north of England. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Willhdavison ( talk • contribs) 21:55, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
The Danish for valley, is dalen, so I can't see Dale being Old English as Dale only occurs as place name in parts of England's Danelaw, such as the Derbyshire Dales near the Danish settlement of Derby! or Yorkshire dales, you don't get it in the south of England which had no Danish settlement. This may come as surprise to people who don't actually come from where modern English developed, which is England not America, but the word dale to describe a valley, fell to describe a Hill, is in common every day use by millions of people in England.
As for doubts about "by" see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/conquest/after_viking/legacy_vikings_02.shtml Which states "Examples are easy to find, with names such as Grimsby ('Grim's homestead'), Thurnby (either 'homestead near a thorn-bush' or 'Thyrne's village'), and Derby ('village near deer') still very common. Grimsby, much as it is today, was likely to be a place of trade and fishing. Thurnby and Derby were probably agricultural villages, where the Vikings made a living for themselves in their new land." The word Derby is in common use in the US, UK and Australia, so I think you can say its a English word of Old Norse origin.
On http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/conquest/after_viking/legacy_vikings_05.shtml it says "The English we write and speak today owes its origins to a mix of the London and east Midlands dialects." and goes on to say "Given that the East Midlands dialect itself was, in origin, a mixture of English and Scandinavian (with French thrown in for good measure), the impact of the Viking invasions remains very much with us today. We still speak a version of English that was born on the borders of Mercia and Danelaw." The Danelaw was not uniformly settled. Danish colonists congregated more densely in some areas than in others – in particular in Yorkshire and the East Midlands in Lincoln, Stamford, Leicester, Nottingham and Derby.
Daughter is also missing from the list 78.146.14.103 ( talk) 18:15, 12 April 2011 (UTC)
I have edited the Ragnarök entry to correct some mistaken translations (namely "Twilight of the Gods", which is not the translation), but I wonder if Ragnarök even belongs on this list since it is not an ON-derived word, but a word which is used only in reference to the mythological event in Norse mythology for which we have no English equivalent word.
136.242.107.85 ( talk) 00:26, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
On the main page, some of the words are in a darker blue than others. What is being indicated by this?
We owe alot as English people to our northern brethren in both culture and genealogy 86.144.66.152 ( talk) 21:20, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
I removed a large chunk from the intro because:
Anyway, I don't think there's anything salvageable from this removed text, but for the sake of posterity and fairness, I'll post it here.
Ufwuct ( talk) 16:16, 16 July 2012 (UTC)
References
seems to be two issues here, the "a" part, and the "loft" part. the a- prefix, does that come from Norse or was it already in English? (see also on this page alive, and i didn't even check for others) does "a-" separated move the word that should be listed to "loft", and then we also have to explain the words "loft/lift" vis a vis German "luft". Any reason to think any of this is Norse into English, or just everybody is Germanic? 68.174.97.122 ( talk) 18:29, 11 November 2012 (UTC)
In addition it appears there are quite some words that appear to be of common Germanic origin rather than taken from Old Norse, especially some of the more frequently used words such as guest, loan and loose. Vandepoel~enwiki ( talk) 12:05, 1 September 2017 (UTC)
According to the OED, the word 'auk' is an original Germanic word, with cognates in Swedish and Danish, derived from Old Norse. This sounds as if this means it is not actually a word English took from Old Norse, but a word we had originally.
The entry on "bug" derives it from "búkr" and glosses it as "insect within tree trunks". However, "búkr" means "belly, abdomen" so the semantic connection here is unclear to say the least. Worse, the linked page on the online etymology dictionary does not support the claim but rather points to Celtic sources. (I've only been able to go back to 2017 with the wayback machine, and the link is dated 2010 so things could have been different.) Incidentally "bock" (he-goat) is used in Swedish to refer to certain wood-boring insects (husbock - house borer) but here the explanation given by svenska.se is an analogy between the antennae and the goat's horns. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.224.188.19 ( talk) 14:58, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
Many words are not exclusively North Germanic, e.g. words that you find in German (and this only a selection):
band, birth, both, crawl (= "krabbeln"), eider, gan (German: Gang), gift, girth, give, guest, hail, how, knife (special tool: Kneip), knot, lathe, loan, loose, plough, reindeer, rib...
And so on
In other words: This list is higly misleading! 84.58.204.55 ( talk) 14:32, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
My understanding is that "hustings" referring to loci of electioneering is of Icelandic origin. House thing? Thing in this context appears in Althing, the Icelandic parliament that has many appearances in the Icelandic sagas. But I'm not expert enough in any of this to add it to the article. Larry Koenigsberg ( talk) 06:33, 14 November 2022 (UTC)
one source??? really? this is ridiculous. a mis-take comes from 'mistaka' ? really? how reliable is this page? Stjohn1970 ( talk) 02:51, 12 January 2024 (UTC)