Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 August 4

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August 4

Original English words for window, foot, bug, and egg

We can read here: "Some of the day-to-day words we’ve inherited from the Vikings include window, foot, bug, and egg."

What were the original English words? Count Iblis (talk) 01:04, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

As far as I know foot isn't a borrowing, the Old Norse word for foot was fótr, and it was never borrowed into English. And bug is a conflation of budde (“beetle”) and bugge (“scarecrow”) As for the other two, which are borrowed from Old Norse, they are eagþyrl and æg in Old English. déhanchements (talk) 01:24, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

If Old Norse fótr had been borrowed into Old English, then of course the Old Norse case endings would have been replaced with Old English case endings, and the long "ø" vowel in the dative singular and nominative/accusative plural would have been replaced by a long "e" vowel (in most OE dialects), so that the result would have been exactly identically the same as the word which already existed in Old English! As far as I can tell, the claim that the word for "foot" was borrowed from Old Norse into Old English is completely vacuous (unverifiable and unfalsifiable)...

As for real borrowings from Old Norse into English, the most famous is the third person plural pronoun forms they/them/their, as mentioned above, while the "hard g" consonant pronunciation of the verb "to give" is also pretty basic. "Sk" at the beginning of a word is sometimes a clue ("skirt", "sky")... AnonMoos (talk) 04:11, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

"Sk" = Norse origin is the result of that sound not occurring in OE; as you can guess from words like "scip" or "Englisc" or "Hámtúnescír", the combination was pronounced like modern "sh". (This isn't an infallible test; cf. "ask", OE infinitive "ascian".) To answer the question, here's what OED says:

• Window indeed is Norse; cf. Icelandic "vindauga". The OE words were "éagduru" and "éagþyrel", i.e. "eye-door" and "eye-hole".
• Foot is English. "fót" (plural "fét"), pronounced roughly like "fote" and "fate", is one spelling, although it came in many different ways in different dialects.
• Bug is uncertain. "Bug" (in the sense of a miniature animal) derives from an earlier and now rare sense related to "bogeyman", which is listed as being of uncertain etymology (although it's compared with "Puck"). A relationship to Norwegian "bugge" ("influential person") is rejected, and Welsh "bwgan" is deemed a borrow word from English. This word's earliest attestation is in the Wyclif Bible.
• Egg is English. "ǽg" (plural "ǽgru"), pronounced roughly like "agg" and "aggruh" if I remember rightly.

Nyttend (talk) 22:34, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

In "ask", the sk is not "at the beginning of a word" (as I specified above). Ascian was exempted from the OE [sk] → [ʃ] change because the cluster in the word metathesized back and forth between [sk] and [ks]...

In Old English ǽg, the "g" letter (or actually "ʒ" letter) would have been pronounced as IPA [j], and Old English ǽgru survived into late Middle English as "Eyren" (as occurs in a famous anecdote in Caxton). The hard "g" of "Egg" is due to Old Norse (as you can read in the OED 1st edition, which I have right here) -- the same as is the case for the hard "g" of "give"... AnonMoos (talk) 02:23, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

Khitan Dictionary

Is there one? The wikipedia article only gives a small vocabulary. déhanchements (talk) 01:24, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

Apparently not (there was a "glossary" in Liáo Shǐ); probably the closest you'll find is a number of studies of the Khitan language by Aisin-Gioro Ulhicun; (publications listed at bottom of the article). The references in the Khitan language article might also be helpful. 2606:A000:1126:28D:A8F0:53CF:71A6:9AF0 (talk) 05:51, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

fractions of Latin

What's the smallest or most unusual fractional number attested in classical Latin? Temerarius (talk) 16:54, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

Not particularly small or unusual, but decimation refers to 1/10th. SinisterLefty (talk) 18:38, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

Cassell's New Latin Dictionary (1968 edition) lists centesimus as an adjective meaning "hundredth", and then adds that the feminine singular centisima was used with pars ("part") understood, to mean "the hundredth" part, a tax of 1%, or interest of 1% per month. Then there is a listing for millesimus or millensimus as an adjective meaning "thousandth", which says it was used with pars ("part"). The dictionary does not state explicitly what that phrase would mean, but I think it is clearly the fraction 1/1,000. And since 1,000 was the largest number with a one-word name in Latin, I think this is very likely the answer. The dictionary cites Cicero for both expressions. --76.69.116.4 (talk) 21:05, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

As for unusual fractions, since pi comes up frequently in the geometry of circles, including arches and domes, I would guess you would find fractions containing pi in an engineering or science context. SinisterLefty (talk) 23:06, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

Since there was no concept of, or notation for, "fractions containing pi" in Roman times, that seems rather unlikely. --76.69.116.4 (talk) 23:13, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

22/7 is a reasonable approximation for pi in engineering work, so they may have used that. The nearest whole number approximation of pi is 3, and that really isn't good enough for most engineering and architecture work, as it's 112 times less accurate. SinisterLefty (talk) 02:10, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

The Romans would have known of Archimedes' result that pi "is greater than 223/71 and less than 22/7", but I'm not sure how often practical architects would have used this. A much better approximation was known to the Chinese shortly after the fall of the Western Roman empire, but not to Europeans until much later... AnonMoos (talk) 02:26, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Temerarius -- As you can see at Roman numerals#Fractions, Romans had special names for each multiple of a twelfth less than one (i.e. from 1/12 to 11/12), some of them rather morphologically opaque... AnonMoos (talk) 02:46, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

That section also lists:

• 1/1728 = siliqua, siliquae, represented by a symbol resembling closing guillemets (»).

This is a rather unusual and small fraction, with 1728 = 27 x 64. I wonder why they found it to be important enough to have a symbol and name. SinisterLefty (talk)

It's the inverse of a great gross (12^3), just as 1/144 is the inverse of a gross (12^2), and 1/12 is the inverse of a dozen (12^1)... AnonMoos (talk) 02:57, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

This meaning of siliqua is interesting, but does not appear in Cassell's. I suggest that it is not attested in classical Latin, as required by the question. --76.69.116.4 (talk) 05:08, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

That section of the Roman Numerals article isn't well-sourced. I wouldn't mind some answers about medieval Latin, but I was asking because I read somewhere that Cicero or whoever mentioned a weird number, like 1/47. Temerarius (talk) 03:44, 6 August 2019 (UTC)