What if Old Names for Gods had Survived into English? 

"Freyja also means lady." Thinks: cognate with Frau!

I used to live near a village called 'Woodnesborough' - 'Woden's hill' and the 'Wood-' part is homophonous with 'wood'.

"Ven" in modern (new) Norwegian still means "beautiful".

Please keep making these, hypothetical construction is so much fun.

We use freyja in compound words with that meaning in Icelandic, húsfreyja is a maid and flugfreyja a stewardess.

I think it's interesting that one of the more common names for Odin in England (just based on theophoric place names) was "Grim" -- going backwards up the etymology tree you get Old English grīma, Proto-Germanic *grīmô, Proto-Indo-European *gʰrey- ... and if you go down a DIFFERENT tree you get the Greek χρῑ́ω (khrio), becoming χριστός (khristos), becoming "Christ" in modern English An unexpected cognate to say the least!

I like Lūca for Loki because the Old English lūcan, in addition to meaning "to lock", also means "to intertwine" or "to tangle", so Lūca would mean something like "Tangler"--a reference to his invention of the fishing net as well as his skill as a schemer. It also gives him a spiderlike quality--a likeness with other trickster deities such as Anansi and Iktomi. The Faroese word for cobweb, "lokkanet", means Lokke's (Loki's) web, as does the Swedish "lockanät".

So satisfying to learn about the common ancestor of "Zeus" and "Jupiter", who sound nothing alike: "Dyews ph²ter". I don't know why, but I like that I know this now.

This was wonderful, Simon. Calling Odin "Wooden" is mind-blowing. And as an American yod-dropper, please coalesce your yods all you want.

Always find it interesting to learn which PIE words ended up in which modern languages. Of all those mentioned in the vid, only one of them came down to Welsh natively (I.e. without being borrowed), said being dyews, which gave us Welsh Duw /dɨu̯/. Though we do have Welsh versions of a few of the mentioned gods, Gwener, from one of the Latin declension of Venus. Jupiter/Jove = iau. In fact, most days of the week in Welsh come from the Roman gods: Monday - Dydd Llun - lunar day Dydd mawrth - Mars day D. Mercher - Mercury D. Iau - Jupiter D. Gwener - Venus D. Sadwrn - Saturn day Sunday- D. Sul - solar day

Regarding the point of Brahman/barrow, there actually is a cognate deity much, well, "closer to home", namely the Irish Brigit (Gallo-Roman and Romano-British "Brigantia"), whose name literally translate to 'august one' or 'exalted one'. The name is also associated with Burgundy (and as such also the Danish isle of Bornholm), as well as the Pre-Roman kingdom of the Brigantes, the area of which approximately coincided with most of the Lancashire, Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Cumberland. The deity Brigit is also associated with the Saint Brigid (via some synchronism, I imagine), it seems, but I must admit my knowledge of this topic only reches as far as the Wiktionary and Wikipedia articles do.

I would like to input that the Great Vowel Shift fails for [u:] before labial and velar consonants, as evidenced by rúm -> room, brúcan -> brook, súcan -> suck, thúma -> thumb. Therefore, I would expect Lúca to become Looker or Lucker instead.

Interesting how the 'frow' did survive in Dutch and German as 'vrouw' and 'Frau' respectively.

Shakespeare uses the coincidence between wood and wood in midsummer nights dream. In his day there survived a wood meaning "mad, possessed".

At some point I think you can get rid of the 'I might make a mistake' disclaimer, your videos are more accurate than basically anything on this subject on the Internet

English is incredible conservative in the pronunciation of semivowel w

2 seconds in and I already know it's a banger

Venus In Welsh is Gwener. Dydd Gwener (Venus Day) is our Friday. All our other days are named after the planets.

People are excessively keen on making Jupiter a Germanic god too. Tiw/Týr is from the o-grade form of the ‘sky’ word, which seems to have just meant ‘heavenly one’ or ‘god’ in general, not the zero-grade form that was paired with the word for ‘father’ and seems to have been the name of the head of the pantheon. If Tiw/Týr were consistently used as a name, or if that name had some suggestion of being a celestial, fatherly or kingly god, then OK maybe. But in the Norse sources, ‘týr’ is as frequently a word for ‘god’ as it is the name of a particular one, because it’s found in a dozen names of Odin. For example, Odin is called Hangaguð or Hangatýr, both meaning ‘hanged god’. By contrast, Týr as a unique character doesn’t really do anything but get nommed twice by canines. Maybe his role reduced over time, or maybe he was never a particularly big deal. If Tiw/Týr being called just ‘god’ makes him Zeus, then what about Freyr? His name is just ‘lord’. Doesn’t that make him sound like the top dude? In Latin, the feminine form of the word is found as ‘Bona Dea’ (‘the good goddess’). All it would take would be for the ‘Bona’ to be dropped (perhaps permitted by some other word such as ‘diva’ or ‘domina’ becoming the ordinary word for goddesses in general, just as ‘guð’ and ‘ás’ took over from ‘týr’ in Old Norse), and ‘Dea’ would then a proper noun referring to her. But no one thinks that she is Jupiter or the queen of all the gods. Tiw/Týr isn’t Dyḗus ph₂tḗr.

Vän in relatively modern Swedish is Beautiful.

Maybe “Wooden” as Odin would cause the word for things made of wood to be described as “Woodic”, similar to “Metallic”.

I love to discover old roots of words and speaking German and even Polish makes it so easy to understand many indo-European. "Ogien" for example in Polish is related to the snaskrit word "Agni" i just realized and its pretty fun to always have a clue still after thousands of years

Barrow, but also Berg, mountain in German. My Scottish grandmother pronounced the d in Wednesday, Wednzdi.

Your vids have been slappin recently

In the name of Wooden, Thunder, Lock, 'Fro and Fry... seems a bit undignified :P

ISTR that Venus/Aphrodite was not an original member of the IE pantheon. Before borrowings from Greek culture, Venus was an innovated deity unique to Rome, later synchretized heavily with Aphrodite. Aphrodite had origins in middle-Eastern paganism as Astarte and was imported by the Greeks. So while you can carry the PIE root forward, there was no deity attached to the root to cement it into the language.

i absolutely adore these kinds of videos! please make more!

Really cool video as usually!

The comments about Thor's name meaning thunder blew my mind as in Dutch the word for Thursday is donderdag (literally thunderday) which is very interesting. I knew there was an association with Thor but I didn't realise donder/thunder is an actual translation of his name!

I love these types of videos, and I dearly hope you make more!

I've been wondering about questions like this for the last year! Very interesting, thank you.

It's so strange, I was talking about this to a colleague at work today how older concepts are contained within modern words, speaking about God's names in particular. Then I run your video about it this evening. Thanks Simon, I always enjoy your videos.

Well this is my favourite video of yours!! Love hypothetical stuff.

Very fun. Thanks, Simon.

I love these types of videos!

another really interesting vid. cheers

Thank you for these excellent videos.

Thank you so much! It was exceptionally interesting to me as a Scandinavian gods worshiper.

Awen/Aven - ‘aphprodite’ in Welsh!

The verbs "ween" and "win" are distantly related to the root of Venus, I ween. There could also be English dialect words related to it through borrowings from Old Norse "vænn", "vænleikr" or "vinr".

Thank you. That was fun. I also appreciated your aside thought about an alternate word treen, had the use of the god name Wooden continued in English.

Not only should we not use "Norse" mythology to approximate old English mythology, we shouldn't even use it to fully approximate Norse mythology on whole since the bulk of our knowledge comes from Iceland and we know that other Nordic countries may have had different lesser gods or even revered an unknown or god while not acknowledging the existence of other figures (i.e. Loki in Denmark). I just stumbled across you and absolutely love what you do.

Thanks, simon!

The reason the Týr/“Tue” god in Germanic mythology isn’t as central as Zeus or Jupiter is because it likely isn’t the same god. As you noted Zeus and Jupiter come from “Dyews”, the name of the Indo-European Sky Father god, while Týr comes from “deywos”, the generic term for a god. They are of course cognate but are two different words in Proto-Indo-European. So the name Týr or Tue seemingly comes from a deity being referred to simply as “the god”. So it could be a descendant of the god Dyews but I don’t see how that’s necessary, it was seemingly a different figure that for whatever reason started being referred to in a general way simply as “the god”. Roman sources identify him with the Roman god Mars in fact.

Come on, Simon, you do not need to be apologetic to proverbial linguistic "flat-earthers". If devout Hindus disagree with the idea of PIE, this doesn't mean they as people don't deserve respect, but their views certainly do not deserve any respect whatsoever. Imagine if an evolutionary biologist had to apologise to creationists - that would be ridiculous.

A number of Latin words found their way into German and Dutch via Proto-Germanic. It might be interesting to reconstruct what the word Venus would be like in modern English if it had made its way from Latin, through Proto-Brittonic, into Old English. Or alternatively, from Latin through Proto-Germanic, into Old English. At least for me, the significance of the name is lost if you ignore the Latin context in which it gained its significance.

This is fascinating!!!

Awesome video!

These videos are great. And it's fun to try to predict the outcome while watching, before seeing what you got to with more attention to detail. Perhaps you could do this with other categories, like Latin words for trees (or something less random - endonymic country names?).

I like this video a lot, what a great idea.

I know in the culture of most Germanic nations (those who call themselves "Western") there seems to be a trend where the speaker is held accountable for the emotional effect of their words in the listener, even if there no ill intention, and no matter how unreasonable it is for the listener to take offense. If find that really hard to understand. If every time I receive information that I don't like I feel negative emotions, isn't it up to me to find inner peace? It's not like the other person is specifically targeting me and trying to cause me mental harm. Why would I feel entitled to demand someone apologize for saying what they believe to be the truth? Do devout Hindus apologize in advance to the rest of the world? Do we apologize to some devout Christians to talk about the shape of the Earth, how beings adapt to the environment, or the value of ratio of circumference to diameter? What happens if we get into a situation were doing A offends group B and doing B offends group A? Where's the limit to who's worthy of apology? If I'm talking about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, do I apologize to supremacist groups for offending them by saying every person has equal dignity?

Another banger!! 🤠💜

wake up babe new simon roper just dropped!!

Interesting thought experiment, thanks Simon 👍. The bit on Jupiter/Jove etc gave me a proper 'penny dropping' moment. P.S. Just noticed the excitable comments. Fwiw, put me in the 'Simon's slide is good way to address the issue'.

Hey man, what you do with your yods is nobody's business but yours ✊🏻 stay strong, brother

this video really coalesced my yods

Actually, ū only diphthongized to /aw/ before coronals, which is why its "room" and not "roum", so the equivalent of Loki woukd likely be Looker not Loucker In addition, the ONorse suffix -i usually came from PGerm -ô, which became OEng -a, so Loki would come from **lukô. This would be OE *Loca, and Modern *Loke :) Great video though, keep up the good work!

great video thank you

Found this page while scrolling endlessly.. glad i did great videos. Interesting

That is, in fact, interesting. Thank you.

This is great!

Very interesting. Thx.

You know me too well, I'm always yammering on about coalescing yods.

Interesting and informative to say the least 🤔

For words such as the reflex of *wenh1os you should keep in mind that by the Old English period any z-stem noun had just as much of a chance of descending from the PG “main stem” as it would of had of descending from the oblique stem. The PIE genitive singular was *wenh1esos, which would have yielded PG **winiziz due to metaphony. So the Old English word could have either descended from the main stem **wen- or the oblique stem **win-, but from what I’ve seen there seems to be more of a tendency towards the oblique stem, so both the Old English and Modern English words would most likely be something like **win.

6:54 Wooden very much _is_ worshipped a god in Los Angeles.

Published just 20 minutes ago and already 400 views+. There is still some hope on RU-vid.

Isn't the Old English "Wynn" related to wenhos? Wynn, meaning, joy, pleasure, etc.

The English word win has a secondary meaning such as appealing as in the old Bible expression winsome words. So it may have survived but began to die out in the mid 20th century.

banger of a video

I'm not sure what specific morphology you're suggesting for OE lūca (< **lūkô? an an-stem from the verb *lūkaną?), but wouldn't we expect a-mutation to have applied here just as it does with loc < luką (not that this doesn't happen in the verb *lūkaną > lūcan, but here the high vowel has likely been restored by analogy to the 3rd person present, and indeed many of the other verb forms, where the stem is not followed by an a)? That would give something like OE lōca > ME loke? look?

Haha, I was thinking about this just the other day!

You mention a Jackson Crawford video about "why we should be careful of using classical mythology too much in interpreting Old Norse mythology". Could you provide a link? I'd like to follow up on that.

Thanks.

By Jove!

Thanks for another interesting video, Simon. :) A few notes you may find interesting. Your Wen for Venus reminds me of the Welsh wen meaning white or pure. Found in Bronwen. For Tuesday : the Finnish word taivas means sky. Also geal is the Scottish Gaelic word for white. For Wednesday : Woden had a dialectic form Weden. For Loki : consider that Lucifer is supposed to be the origin of luck.

3:37 that's me. Most people around me yod drop though I've noticed that people of South Asian descent, even third generation like me yod drop less than others in Canada.

thank you

Nynorsk or new-norwegian Ven means beautiful. So it might actually have followed that route

I just came across your channel. Do you have any videos related to Anatoly Fomenko's Chronology works? I can't quite describe it, but I feel like if you haven't dug into his works yet, you may be able to shed an amazing amount of light on the Alternative History genre

We have two words for Zeus in Greek Ζεύς Zeus Δία Dia (means god in a lot of modern romance languages now)

I had always dreamed of reviving proto Indo-European words that didn’t make it into some of the daughter languages. I love it when a PIE words makes it into most later branches like the word for “I” such as I (*éǵh₂ in PIE, ego in Latin, ego in Ancient Greek, Ik in proto Germanic, aham in Sanskrit) but I totally hate it when this doesn’t happen and since I’m no expert, I can’t really reconstruct lost words by myself

Love doing this with Old Norse words. Very fun to imagine these words existing in modern English.

People are entitled to their beliefs and feelings, but this does not need to apologise to anyone when you are presenting facts.

👏🙂 Very interesting

really injowed this shorter video

Are you an archaeologist by profession? I also studied at Uclan and I'm considering going back for an archaeological degree.

This reminds me of how the names of Norse gods changed in Swedish over the centuries. If I remember correctly, Freya became Fröa, and Sleipnir became Släppner, for example. But we seem to have reverted to the Icelandic versions at some point, and the old folk versions of the names sound really weird to me now ... Like, way too casual, and not as cool.

Wodan is already associated with wood through the name of the Ash tree. Ash is a rune that means god, and Wodan's spear was carved from an Ash tree.

The shift from /uː/ to /aw/ did not generally happen before non-coronal consonants like k or m (compare the word "room"), so I that *Louker would have remained /luːkər/ and then shortened to /lʊkər/. That would probably be the form in Modern English.

What a fun video. I'm sure others have pointed out that Odin (the Norse cognate to Anglo-Saxon Woden) seemed to have a link with trees. Famously he was entangled and hung from one. I like the idea that, if you extrapolated it out, Wooden would be the God so people would describe things like a "treen stool" instead.

is there a guide somewhere online of the sound changes from old english to modern english?

God has always been associated with the tree (wood, Yggdrasil), since creation emerges like from a hidden root and branches out into the multiplicity of creation.

Do you have a link to the video by Jackson Crawford mentioned at 4:15 ?

really interesting

This has been my area of interest for over two decades teaching English and an exchange about the Name of God as YHWH or Giove with the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1997. Lately I have been interested in Ancient Egyptian words that survive in modern languages. For some time I have thought that the correct pronunciation of the names of their gods was important to gain some insight into how they thought.

More please on Loki Louck Luca. Connections to the modern name Lucca / Luka would be interesting rabbit Warren to go down.

When you talk about a “sound change algorithm”, is there such a thing publically available, or was it just a figure of speech?

That was fun.

"This chew word" 😊