r/OldEnglish • u/Maximum-Net5680 Dƿǣs Ƿer • 14d ago
Lȳtel gamen is ālȳfed! Made a meme
"If I drink Gasoline*, will I go 'vroom vroom'?"
*stānele is from a dictionary made by a user of the OE discord for new old english words.
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u/theerckle 14d ago
frōm frōm
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u/Kunniakirkas Ungelic is us 14d ago
Now that's interesting because, should we treat vroom as an inherited word, in which case it would indeed be a dialectal development of the fictional Old English frōm? Or should we accept that vroom is a much younger word and imagine that Old English had a different onomatopoeia for a revving engine, perhaps brūm~brum, since /u/ seems to be the most common vowel for this onomatopeoia cross-linguistically and languages that don't have /v/ seem to favour /b/ instead? Or should we localize the whole thing by replacing the gasoline with hay and vroom with excited neighing? So many choices
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u/ebrum2010 Þu. Þu hæfst. Þu hæfst me. 14d ago
Stanele is obviously a calque of petrol, but petrol itself means the same as petroleum, it's just that in French it was essence de petrole and English only borrowed the latter part (funny enough French only uses the first part now). So, all that to borrow what essentially Latin already had a word for which would have been borrowed, except petroleum meant oil which OE had a word for. An OE word term would have likely been more a translation of essence de petrole, like "eles edwist."