Reference on Numbers of Saxons

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Fri Dec 1 09:06:38 UTC 2000


In a message dated 11/30/00 7:59:59 PM Mountain Standard Time,
rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

>Are you only including words documented in written sources before the Norman
>conquest?

-- more or less.  The written form of Old English was, as far as one can
tell, quite close to the spoken form, at least in the Wessex area.

>Scanning Buck and Partridge, I get the impression that there were many more.

-- more in some dialects at some time.  Eg., shepherd's counting vocabulary
in many parts of northern and western England is transparently Welsh... but
the form of the numerals shows that these are loans from medieval Welsh, not
survivals from Brythonic!

>BTW: what percentage of Old English and Briton vocabulary consisted of close
>cognates?

-- not many. By the 6th century CE, Celtic and Germanic were no closer than
either was to Latin, and most cognates wouldn't have been detectable to
speakers of either group.



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