Learning Anglo Saxon words

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Iuri
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Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby Iuri » Sat May 20, 2017 12:29 pm

Hi! I'm currently trying to learn all of the English words of Anglo Saxon and Old Norse and Scandinavian origin, I already have all the English I need so I have no reason to do it other than my desire to do it and my love for Germanic languages in general. I'm following these wikipedia lists with the hope that they are comprehensive but I wonder, do they really have all of the Anglo Saxon/Old Norse words? How many words derived from Anglo Saxon are still there in the modern English language, does anybody know? I couldn't find any definite number on the web.

Of course that I don't expect anyone to count the lists, I only wanted some of your thoughts about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_E ... xon_origin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_E ... rse_origin

One side effect that I am expecting if I master these words is to boost my English literacy, guessing words derived from French and Latin is kinda ok for me, being a native speaker of Portuguese, but guessing words of Germanic origin is hard, so I'm hoping these will help me boost my "germanic awareness" to a level close to that of a native speaker.
I'm doing this for my own pleasure however, so I have no hurry, I'm going to take this slowly and steadily, I'm even thinking of compiling and binding a dictionary for personal use from printing the pages of that big Oxford dictionary that I have access to at my library.
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Re: Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby SophiaMerlin_II » Sat May 20, 2017 4:21 pm

Seeing as there is a constant fight over just how many words English has, you won't be able to figure out how many of these are Anglo-saxon in origin.
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Re: Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby Speakeasy » Sat May 20, 2017 4:35 pm

A highly-regarded reference for the etymology of English is: The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology
https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Dictionary-English-Etymology/dp/0198611129

If you are embarking on a special project, perhaps the staff of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) could offer some guidance: http://www.oed.com/
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Re: Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby arthaey » Sat May 20, 2017 5:40 pm

You might check out Anglish: http://anglish.wikia.com
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Re: Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby Tomás » Sat May 20, 2017 11:14 pm

Iuri wrote:Hi! I'm currently trying to learn all of the English words of Anglo Saxon and Old Norse and Scandinavian origin, I already have all the English I need so I have no reason to do it other than my desire to do it and my love for Germanic languages in general. I'm following these wikipedia lists with the hope that they are comprehensive but I wonder, do they really have all of the Anglo Saxon/Old Norse words? How many words derived from Anglo Saxon are still there in the modern English language, does anybody know? I couldn't find any definite number on the web.

Of course that I don't expect anyone to count the lists, I only wanted some of your thoughts about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_E ... xon_origin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_E ... rse_origin

One side effect that I am expecting if I master these words is to boost my English literacy, guessing words derived from French and Latin is kinda ok for me, being a native speaker of Portuguese, but guessing words of Germanic origin is hard, so I'm hoping these will help me boost my "germanic awareness" to a level close to that of a native speaker.
I'm doing this for my own pleasure however, so I have no hurry, I'm going to take this slowly and steadily, I'm even thinking of compiling and binding a dictionary for personal use from printing the pages of that big Oxford dictionary that I have access to at my library.


Very interesting lists, and a very interesting project. If you have the means, I would concatenate the two lists, then sort them against a frequency list, then learn the most common words first. I think your English will improve greatly if you can learn these lists.
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Re: Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby Iuri » Sun May 21, 2017 2:31 am

Wow, thank you for all of your comments!

Speakeasy wrote:A highly-regarded reference for the etymology of English is: The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology

https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Dictionary-English-Etymology/dp/0198611129

If you are embarking on a special project, perhaps the staff of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) could offer some guidance: http://www.oed.com/

That looks like to be an incredible resource, it's a little expensive for me at this moment but it's good to know of its existence. Thanks for the tip!

It's nothing "really" special because of the time available and resources that I have, I just want to make something tidy and "nice", my idea is to go to the library that I have access to, which has an exemplar of the Oxford dictionary, and go word by word at the dictionary, refering to the lists, and scanning or printing the word sections, after that I plan to professionaly bind them with a nice cover so I can have my own personal dictionary of English words of Anglo Saxon/Scandinavian origin.

I think if I could get some sort of help from the OED that would be great but do you think they would have this kind of list readily available and would be willing to partake? Also, I don't know if asking them for help on this would be proper since I'm kinda doing an "illegal" thing(copyrights), even though I'm not really harming anyone since this is just for personal use and a very innocent project in my opinion.

arthaey wrote:You might check out Anglish: http://anglish.wikia.com


I've read about Anglish before and I got to say that I think it's an interesting concept, I think it can be fun as an intellectual pursuit or hobby but I don't think it can attain it's ultimate goal of replacing English as the national language of English speaking countries, neither I think that it would be healthy to attempt such a thing. I think that mother tongues are too deeply ingrained within ourselves and unlike secondary languages, are too intertwined to our emotional feelings and mental health, I think that purposely attempting to change one's own native tongue for the sake of any idealism or any other reason would only serve to harm the person. I do think that Anglish is an interesting idea though, but as I said, as an interesting concept or hobby, much in the same way that the learning of a language such as Quenya would be. Maybe even to be used in a controlled context but certainly not in a definite status. Just my opinion of course.

Tomás wrote:Very interesting lists, and a very interesting project. If you have the means, I would concatenate the two lists, then sort them against a frequency list, then learn the most common words first. I think your English will improve greatly if you can learn these lists.


Thanks for the feedback! How I would I go about this, is there some kind of software that would do that for free?
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Re: Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby Tomás » Sun May 21, 2017 3:29 pm

Tomás wrote:Very interesting lists, and a very interesting project. If you have the means, I would concatenate the two lists, then sort them against a frequency list, then learn the most common words first. I think your English will improve greatly if you can learn these lists.


Thanks for the feedback! How I would I go about this, is there some kind of software that would do that for free?[/quote]

Any spreadsheet can do the sorting:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18343322/how-can-i-sort-one-set-of-data-to-match-another-set-of-data-in-excel

Google Sheets is free.
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Re: Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby Iuri » Sun May 21, 2017 5:32 pm


Thanks!
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Re: Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby IronMike » Mon May 22, 2017 5:20 pm

Interesting fact for you re: Anglo-Saxon words in Modern English, from John McWhorter's The Power of Babel, p. 95:
Out of all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary...no less than 99% were taken from other languages. The relative few that trace back to Old English itself are...62% of the words most used [by English speakers]
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Re: Learning Anglo Saxon words

Postby schlaraffenland » Mon May 22, 2017 7:57 pm

I would also strongly encourage learning these sorts of words after you have been able to sort them according to frequency. If your goal is more or less just to "collect" English words of Anglo-Saxon origin, then you can learn anything from these lists arbitrarily. But if you are planning to employ more such words in your writing or speaking, then caution is necessary. Many of the words on the Wikipedia pages you linked have fallen entirely out of English usage and would also not be recognizable even to a well-educated English speaker (e.g. "athel"). Some are beautiful formulations but are used only one in a blue moon in English writing/speaking these days (a personal favorite that I trot out when I can: "I am chary of etc. etc."). A word-frequency comparison will help you to see which words are still circulating.

On the other hand, knowledge of some of these near-extinct words might help if you want to read certain kinds of English literature, and not just Beowulf-type stuff. I recall learning a heap of Anglo-Saxon-origin words via Shakespeare in high school. If you get ahold of the Folger Library Editions of Shakespeare's plays, you'll find annotations for exactly these sorts of words on the pages facing the play's text.
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