(1989)
Atomic Physics in Pure Anglo-Saxon
11–14 of 14 posts
Re: Atomic Physics in Pure Anglo-Saxon
#12I'm amazed at how much I could understand of that. I presume ymirstuff is uranium. Many of the others are more obvious.
Odd: "Germanstuff" for Titanium.. did Poul mean Entstuff? (Didn't read enough Tolkien?) Was perhaps actually inspired by modern German.. surprisingly, "Stoff" is from old french via early modern(!) Dutch. Proper A-S might be "andwork/anwerk[.de]" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/andweorc Cathay-andwork (for chinesium) Unbeget-andwork (for unobtainium) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Stoff#German
I doubt that there was a "german" word in Old English.
There are 2 "german" words. One refers to what were previously called Teutonic people, from the name they used themselves, which was later changed to the name used in Latin by Caesar for them.
The second "german" word, which is also spelled "germane" comes from a completely unrelated Latin word which refers to siblings who share both parents, whence "hermano" in Spanish.
The second sense "germane" seems older in English. Perhaps it already existed as a Latin borrowing in Old English.
Otherwise, perhaps the author has used "Germanstuff" because no word for Titans existed in Old English and "titanium" was discovered and named by a German, i.e. by Klaproth, from whom a lot of chemical element names have come.
Re: Atomic Physics in Pure Anglo-Saxon
#13And here's the original, in the mid-Dec 1989 issue of Analog Science Fact & Fiction magazine (at the bottom of the page) on the unparalleled Luminist Archives website:
https://readitfree.org/SF/AN_2.htm
(Luminist is one of the jewels of the internet, right up there with Archive and Wikipedia. Support them!)
Re: Atomic Physics in Pure Anglo-Saxon
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Odd: "Germanstuff" for Titanium.. did Poul mean Entstuff? (Didn't read enough Tolkien?) Was perhaps actually inspired by modern German.. surprisingly, "Stoff" is from old french via early modern(!) Dutch. Proper A-S might be "andwork/anwerk[.de]" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/andweorc Cathay-andwork (for chinesium) Unbeget-andwork (for unobtainium) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Stoff#German
I doubt that there was a "german" word in Old English. There are 2 "german" words. One refers to what were previously called Teutonic people, from the name they used themselves, which was later changed to the name used in Latin by Caesar for them. The second "german" word, which is also spelled "germane" comes from a completely unrelated Latin word which refers to siblings who share both parents, whence "hermano" in…
Ahh a bit late.
Ents was the direct Anglo-Saxon equivalent of Titans. Maybe even cognate.
Vanir - Titans - Ents
Aesir - Olympians - Ese
god-generations in proto-Indo-European mythology.