Name change from 'lingvojn' to 'gearncniht'

Okay, okay. I decided to change my name.... Since this blog is predominantly about knitting, I thought I should have a more fiber-relevant name. Though I predominantly knit, I also like to crochet, so I thought I should have something a little less craft-specific. So, at the suggestion of my boyfriend, I decided to make a compound based on Old English (OE) words (I'm a historical linguist who works predominantly with the history of English...). The result is gearncniht.

(þæt) gearn is the OE word for 'yarn' (as if you couldn't guess that! ^^). It was pronounced, in our reconstructed pronunciation, more or less as it is in Modern English (ModE). Except with a trilled [r]. And a slightly different [a] sound. But other than that, it's the same (the spelling {ge} usually represents a [y] sound, for instance in the OE word geong 'young')! Gearn could also mean 'thread', unlike (my use of) the modern word 'yarn', so it also covers my cross-stitching and sewing. ^^ For those interested, it's cognate with Dutch (het) garen, German (das) Garn and Icelandic garn(ið), and it is a neuter noun in all these languages. I'll have a post about 'yarn' later... Perhaps tomorrow.... We'll see...

The second part, (se) cniht, has become our word 'knight' though the meaning and pronunciation have changed quite a bit over time (as well as the spelling!). In OE, it was pronounced the way it was spelled--both the {c} and the {h} were pronounced, and the {i} was short, like in the ModE word knit. It had a few possible meanings, the modern sense not among them: boy, youth, squire, servant. Cognates are Dutch (de) knecht and German (der) Knecht, both of which have retained the 'servant'/'slave'/'farmhand' meaning. And the word is masculine in OE and German (as you could probably guess) and common gender in Dutch (Dutch has more or less lost the distinction between masculine and feminine, creating an opposition between common and neuter gender).

So there you have it! ^^

PS.--A note on my symbology... Italicized words are words in a foreign language (well, is OE a foreign language?). Italicized words in (parentheses) before or after a word in italics are the appropriate definite articles in whatever language to show the gender of the word in question. Letters between {curly braces} represent spelled letters. Letters between [square brackets] represent a pronunciation. Words with 'single quotes' are the meanings of italicized words or instances where I refer to a word as a word. Oh, and ^^ is the Asian (well, Korean, at least) emoticon for a smile (think of your eyes when you smile!).