The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009
Hooray for anglo-saxon!
Why is english so strange?
English is a language with a lot of different words—actually hundreds of thousands of them. If you ever look in a dictionary that tells you where a word originally comes from (this is called etymology), you will see that English words come from many different languages—French, Latin, Norse, Dutch, Greek, Hindi, Arabic, Yiddish, Japanese—and more.
But the first English words came from the German language called Anglo-Saxon—otherwise known as Old English. We owe a lot to those Anglo-Saxons. The days of the week, for example. Sunday, Monday, and Saturday are named after the sun, moon, and Saturn, but the other days take their names from Anglo-Saxon gods. So Tuesday is “Tiw’s day” (god of battle); Wednesday is “Woden’s day” (god of war); Thursday is “Thor’s day” (god of thunder); and Friday is “Frigg’s day” (goddess of love).
And even though there are now hundreds of thousands of other words in English, most of our common everyday words still come from Anglo-Saxon. Beautiful strong, short, simple words, like: sun, moon, land, friend, hope, snow, shame, smile, groan, love, live, wife, house, child, man, fight.
Don’t be fooled, though. If we Word Snoops went back in time, we wouldn’t be able to understand very much of what anyone was saying in those days. Anglo-Saxon was just too different to what we now speak, especially in how it sounded and was spelled. But if you’re really interested, you can still learn Anglo-Saxon at college one day. (See you there!)
Hey, just for fun, have a look at the list on the opposite page and see if you can write a sentence that only uses Anglo-Saxon words. Here’s a little Anglo-Saxon rhyme the Word Snoop just made up to give you an idea.
My brother eats cold cheese at night
And butter in the morning light.
(Mmm, yum!)
Some Anglo-Saxon words used in Modern English
a, and, at
after
all
bed
before
brother
butter
by
cheese
child
cold
day
drink
earth
eat
egg
father
fear
fight
fire
friend
go
good
hill
his, him, her
home
honey
hope
house
in, on, over
land
light
lightning
live, love
man
meat
midnight
milk
moon
morning
mother
my, me
name
night
noon
rain
sea
shirt
shoe
sister
smile
snow
sock
sorrow
spring
star
summer
sun
the, then, there
thunder
to
up
water
why
winter
with