Old English
 

I don’t have this book yet but I ran across this review and wanted to share it because it looks like fun. If you’re an expert in Old English this may not be for you. I’m not and I look forward to spending time with “The Wordhord.”


https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wor...hare_permalink

Hwaet!

I've been studying Swedish lately, and it is interesting to see how many words in Modern English are North rather than West Germanic in origin (i.e., not akin to German). There's an old story that English is a West Germanic language with a North Germanic superstrate, but I think that doesn't entirely do justice to the intermediary position from which the speakers of Old English came. They weren't from Holland, they were from Jutland, in essence.

Cheers,
John

Oh, thus, boy is pojke, but Junge in German.

One of the five Finnish words I know is "poika," so I had to look this up. If Wiktionary can be trusted, Swedish "pojke" has nothing to do etymologically with English "boy" but comes from Finnish and the Uralic family. Who would have thought such a basic word would be borrowed from Siberian reindeer herders?

Yes, and to take this one step further, apparently "boy" has West Germanic cognates after all, in Frisian notably. But some of the etymologies given seem selective: thus English "after" lists Dutch "achter" as a cognate without mentioning the Swedish (and Danish) "eftersom." I suspect they default to West Germanic cognates because of a parti pris. Or, for instance, compare Swedish "mat," food, with English "meat." German and Dutch to my knowledge lack this etymon (Essen/eten, Fleisch/vlees).
Interesting about pojke though!

Cheers,
John