delve
This is the first in a series of three Swadesh list posts:
- Middle English
- Norman French
- Why not both?
Since learning about the obsolete Middle English word scyld, meaning debt, I’ve been bitten by the “what other surprising obsolete Middle or Old English words are there?” bug. The problem is, how can you determine what words aren’t used any more? It’s like trying to notice all the annoying habits your friend doesn’t have. You could enumerate all the common annoying habits and laboriously go through them one by one, and still be nowhere close to thorough.
Anyway, I found a way to enumerate all the common words and laboriously went through them one by one. (I know it would be easier to find a list made by someone who’s already gone through this exercise, but there are two additional upcoming parts to this investigation that would have been much more difficult if I did.) Lexicostatistics is a subfield of historical linguistics that tries to clade languages based on the magnitude of differences between their common words. So linguists have spent decades coming up with lists of which words work best for this that I can repurpose. The lowest-hanging fruit I found is that Wiktionary keeps Swadesh lists (the first commonly-used list of meanings, from 1952) for hundreds of different languages, including the dead one I care about right now.
So I came up with a long list of meanings where Modern English uses a completely different word than Old English did. For comparison, I’m including cognates from other related languages. German (Gm.) last shared a common ancestor with English about 1500 years ago; Norwegian (Nor.) shared one about 1700 years ago; and Latin (L.) shared one about 4000 years ago. I’m saving some of the words for a subsequent post, but the remainder are:
Words that are completely disused now:
| Old English | Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| fele | many | Gm. viel |
| swire | neck | |
| swelt | to die | |
| snithe | to cut | Gm. schneiden |
| quethe | to say | past tense preserved as quoth |
| tee | to pull | |
| welkin | cloud | Gm. Wolke |
| swart | black | adjective preserved as swarthy; Gm. schwarz |
| sweethra | right | |
| winestra | left | L. sinestra |
| mid | with | Gm. mit |
Words with different meanings now:
| Old English | Former Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| were- | man | L. vir- |
| rind | (tree) bark | |
| ridge | (a person's) back | |
| wit | to know (a fact) | Gm. wissen |
| ken | to know (a person) | Gm. kennen |
| to sting | to stab | |
| to sell | to give | |
| twinge | to squeeze | |
| mist | fog | |
| heaven | sky | Gm. Himmel |
| right | straight (not askew) | |
| stump | dull (not sharp) | Gm. stumpf |
| for | because | Nor. fordi |
Words we still use, but only in a more specific context now:
| Old English | Former Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| broad | wide | Gm. breit |
| man | person | "woman" comes from wif- "female" + -man "person" |
| fowl | bird | |
| hound | dog | |
| flesh | meat | |
| womb | belly | |
| canny | knowledgeable | |
| cleave | to split | |
| delve | to dig | |
| to stick (with a pointy thing) | to stab | Gm. stechen |
| knead | rub | Nor. gni |
| mere | lake | |
| barrow (location) | mountain | Gm. Berg |
| evil | bad | |
| foul | rotten | Gm. faul |