Hello - the origins

All of these languages also have some variation on the word "mine," also: "mein," "mi," "mon," etc. Same with "no:" "no," "nein," "non," "nyet." Similarly, I've always assumed that "hello" was just one of those Indo-European whose origin you probably can't quite pinpoint.

Greg: You wrote: " I don't think the origin of Fr <bateau> = En <boat> is necessarily Anglo-Saxon."

W.D. Elcock in "The Romance Languages" mentions several Saxon loan words in French and includes "bateau" as one of them. The word has also been borrowed into Welsh bad ;plural badau and Irish bata ; plural bataí "boat."

It is true that ren "reindeer" was originally Old Norse but the word came into French via English. People forget that there was heavy Scandinavian settlement , especially Danish, in England.


Travis: Re: "I'd assume that it'd be of common West Germanic origin then..."

I'm inclined to agree. Even in French, Catalan, Spanish it is probably an English or at least, Teutonic, loan of some kind.

<<All of these languages also have some variation on the word "mine," also: "mein," "mi," "mon," etc. Same with "no:" "no," "nein," "non," "nyet." Similarly, I've always assumed that "hello" was just one of those Indo-European whose origin you probably can't quite pinpoint. >>

Speaking of the word 'no', I've always assumed that it was a french loan word, 'non', that displaced the Old English 'nae' or 'nay'. However, I read on, I believe, dictionary.com that it is derived from the Old Enlgish 'na'. To me, this doesn't seem very plausible, when the English 'no' is said exactly the same as the french 'non', well almost, anyway.

Brennus,

OF <rengier> / <rangier> (an alteration of ON <hreindyri> / <rendyr> now limited, in French, to a heraldic acceptation) is found in "Rose" by Jean de Meun (1269), that is well before En <reindeer> entered the English vocabulary (around 1400). This etymological fact alone is also consistent with histroy : the Viking attacks and invasions of Neustria (the northern part of which later became Normandy) may account for the adoption of the ON etymon in Normand and Picard, and French subsequently.
The modern etymon Fr <renne> was adopted in 1678 directly from either Danish or Scandinavian (in "Journal des savants") although a distinct loanword, MF <reen>, was found previously in the French translation (dated 1552)of the German edition of Sebastian Müller's "Cosmographiae Universalis" published in 1550 in Basel (German title : "Cosmographei, oder, Beschreibung aller Laender, Herrschaften, fuernem sten Stetten, Geschichten").
So nothing to do with English in either case indeed.

Likewise, you can't dismiss the fact that Flanders were part of the kingdom of France during a long period in the Middle Ages. Flanders, Picardy, Normandy and the Royal Domain proper had very intricate economic relationships, including navigation (inland or at sea). So, unless proven otherwise (in scripta for instance), the Old Dutch hypothesis for Fr <bateau> remains conceivable.

Erratum : from either Danish or Swedish.