Old English

Got the Sniffles, in Old English

/ Edmund Fairfax / 2 Comments

Got the Sniffles, in Old English

coldI am fighting off a cold, which has prompted my groggy brain to wonder about how one expressed ‘to have a cold’ in Old English. Attested only five times, gepos (neut. a-stem) was apparently the common term for ‘(head-)cold’ (< Brythonic *pas- ‘cough’). The noun is found twice in conjunction with gesnot ‘catarrh, mucus’ (extant only twice): wið gesnote and (wið) geposum ‘for the treatment of catarrh and head-colds.’ Presumably then, one would have said *habban þæt gepos for ‘to have a cold.’ Such a phrase is at least suggested by the Middle English equivalent to have(n) the pose, cf. “he hath the pose” (Chaucer’s “Manciple’s Prologue,” l. 62). An alternative suggested again by Middle English is *bēon on (þǣm) gepose, lit. ‘to be in a cold’ (ME to be(n) on the pose), cf. “he speketh thurgh the nose / As he were on the quake or on the pose” (Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale,” l. 4152), lit. ‘he speaks through the nose as if he were hoarse or had a cold.’ (The noun pose continued to be used as late as the early nineteenth century, according to the OED, at least in dialect.) And what did one do when one had “the pose”? One would of course “snite”—to use the obsolete word (< OE snŷtan)—that is, ‘blow or clear (one’s nose).’ The verb snŷtan is the reflex of late Proto-Germanic *snūtijana ‘to clear (one’s nose),’ cf. Old Norse snýta, Old High German snûzen (> ModG schneuzen). The expected Gothic form would be *snūtjan. The verb originally seems to have meant quite literally ‘to snot.’ And so, “thag you very buch.”

Are You Coming or Going? (In Gothic or Old English)

/ Edmund Fairfax / 1 Comment

kwimis

Are You Coming or Going?

(In Gothic or Old English)

The pairs Gothic qiman / gaggan and Old English cuman / gan, when used as simple verbs of motion, are commonly equated with Modern English ‘to come / to go’ respectively, but this is somewhat of a misrepresentation. Consider the following OE examples:

ga hider (Gen. 27.21) ‘come (lit. ‘go’) here’
Nero cwæð, “gang me near hider” (Blick. Hom. 179.30) ‘Nero said, “come (lit. ‘go’) closer to me here”’

In Modern English, ‘to come,’ not ‘to go,’ must be used when the local reference is to a first-person speaker, but this clearly did not apply in Old English, as these examples show. The restriction was likewise not observed in Gothic:

jah insandida skalk seinana hweilai nahtamatis qiþan þaim haitanam, “gaggiþ, unte ju manwu ist allata” (L 14.17) ‘when it is was time for dinner, he sent his slave to say to the guests, “come (lit. ‘go’), as everything is ready now”’
letiþ þo barna gaggan du mis, jah ni warjiþ þo (Mk 10.14) ‘let the children come (lit. ‘go’) to me, and do not stop them’
jabai hwas gaggiþ du mis (L 14.26) ‘if anyone comes (lit. ‘goes’) to me’

The examples given above suggest that gaggan / gan were – or leastwise could be – used to mean ‘to come’ when the focus was on the leaving of a spot, i.e., on the beginning of the action of coming, seemingly with the connotation that the potential mover was blocked in some way, held back by necessity, reticence, authority, etc. Thus, “let the children ‘go’ to me” = ‘do not hold them back (ni warjiþ þo ‘do not stop them’) but let them leave that spot and proceed to me,’ and “‘go,’ as everything is ready” = ‘there is no need now to wait here any longer; you are free to proceed to table.’

In the following example, qiman, and not gaggan, is used because the focus is not on the leaving but on the arriving: “have you come here to torment us?” = ‘are you here now to torment us?’:

qamt her faur mel balwjan unsis? (Mt 8.29) ‘have you come here to torment us before it is time?’

The same applies in the following OE example:

hi ferdon þa and comon and cwædon to Iosue (Josh 7.3) ‘then they returned [lit. ‘went and came’] and said to Joshua’