sol

[peter horn]

Im sure this has been discussed before but cannot trace the thread.
OE sol, as in 'sol monath', is sometimes taken to mean sun and sometimes taken to mean mud.
Kathleen Herbert takes it to mean mud, and february (Febuary Fill-dike) certainly seems more of a mud month than a sun month.
Ive just come across a note I made when reading a book by John Earle (the AS Scholar) I think it might have been his book on AS Plant-names. I quote:
The word sol is rarer and more remote than sunne. (In OE he means) It is cognate to the Latin word of the same sound and sense, but independant of it. In the Scandinavian language it has happened reversely, Sol has been preserved in use, while sunna is known only as a poetic word.
Thus in Icelandic proverb "Island er hit betsa land sem
solin skin uppa" 
Can someone please translate this proverb?

[Horsa]

Iceland is the best land which the sun shines upon.

[peter horn]

Iceland is the best land which the sun shines upon.

Thanks
peter

[Horsa]

I posted on this before, but my post seems to have been lost during the blackout.

There appears to be a bunch of word pairs in the Germanic languages where North Germanic favoured a different word to West Germanic

The speakers of west german languages picked from the left column and the speakers of North germanic languages picked from the right column.

ǽ á æ é í ó ú ý þ
      
Englisc    sol    sunne
Norse   sol    sunna
Englisc   æled   fýr    
Norse   eld      ?
Englisc   gamol    eald
Norse   gammall   -ald-

The norse cognate for old is preserved in the comparative and superlative of gammall which is eldri eldst. I can't find a cognate to fire. Swedish has fyr which means lighthouse, but they may have nabbed that from low german.

I vaguely remember something possibly being posted on this before on the old gegaderung. As I remember it, there was a function for these word pairs in proto germanic, that goes something along the lines of if you're talking generally about fire, you'd use one word, if you're talking about an actual fire that has happened or will happen you'd use another word.

I don't know if I've remembered this correctly and I don't know how this would apply to an adjective like old.

[Linden]

................... I can't find a cognate to fire. .....................................

I know that this thread was a long time ago but just in case you are still interested -there is one.
This is from the Cleasby/Vigfusson Icelandic dictionary
 
FÚRR, m. (not furr, but with the vowel long, cp. fúrs, skúrum, Vellekla), [A. S. fyre; Engl. fire; O. H. G. fiûr; Germ. feuer; Gr. GREEK] :-- fire, only in poetry and poët. compds, never in prose, Lex. Poët.; vide eldr, p. 125.

[Horsa]

Ah, the Cleasby Vigfusson dictionary. Where did you get a hold of that. There used to be on online over at Northvegr, but it seems to have disappeared from there.

And, yes, I am still interested. I am chuffed to have learnt the Norse cognate to fire, and also that the chart has been filled in.

Your reply propelled me over to the bosworth toller dictionary to see if the Old English æled was mainly a poetic word, but it didn't really say.

[Linden]

Ah, the Cleasby Vigfusson dictionary. Where did you get a hold of that. .....................................................................

Here it is
http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oi_cleasbyvigfusson_about.html
 
Also - according to "A Grouped Frequency Word-List of Anglo-Saxon Poetry" 1966 Madden/Magoun
fyr/fyren is used 180 times in verse compared with 32 for ælan/æled/ælung.  I don't have any comparable info for prose usage.