Looks as if my halfpen'eth is a bit late, but here goes. It struck me that you could get way with dæġcofa, ‘day room’ for an ordinary domestic lounge or sitting room. I don’t see how day rooms need necessarily be parts of institutions only. I’ve just been reading Roxy Freeman’s Little Gypsy in which her family built themselves a day room for their camp in Norfolk. If it isn’t a standalone version of a domestic lounge or sitting room for family use, I don’t see how else you could define it.
For ‘car’ I commonly put just wæġn and leave readers at the mercy of their common sense and general knowledge. It’s not a writer’s fault if a reader doesn’t have any. If memory serves, the line I get out of my car in my old, Old English ( and not Gothic) rendition of Hello Earth ran Iċ forlǽte mín wæġn. Yet do I guess that you wish to be more specific, and make clear you are speaking of a post-1900 motor-car, automobile or brum-brum? Searowæġn would be the best I can think of without taking too long, unless you happen to drive a hatchback which, I think, you can get away with transliterally: hæċċebæc, eh? Otherwise I suppose you could just spell the make of car phonetically and bung that at the front of wæġn. Drífþ þú laġlandwæġn, hondawæġn, fordwæġn oþþe hwæt?
What about hwéolhors for ‘bicycle’? Though I, too hit upon twihwéol so maybe that recommends it?
I presumed you meant the musical instrument by ‘recorder’ and not a tape recorder. Yet at first blush I wondered why you’re not happy with pípe, too. But again, if exactitude is important then I should ask you, as the musician, to put your finger on the defining characteristic by which you can tell a recorder apart from just any old, or any other, wind instrument. If a recorder is the only one that both needs fingering and originally was made only from wood, I’d suggest fingerbéam, ‘finger-wood’ by analogy with glíwbéam, ‘glee-wood’ for a harp. Either that or choose a native species of bird whose call seems plausibly recorder-ish and call if a [that]-pípe. An úlepípe sounds fun, certainly. Or was there any specific purpose for which recorders were originally made, or characteristic parts they once played?
As with ‘car’, I’d just put ofen for ‘cooker’ and damn the dimbos. Or do you have a hob with no oven underneath, or something? You could call such a thing a panne-hǽta, I suppose.
If yours is a hand-operated sewing machine I’d plump for síwhwéol ( since we have spinning wheels, why not sewing wheels?) but what about a sticsáwend ‘stitch-sower’ or nædldrífend, ‘needle-driver’ for both that and an electric one?
As for the TV, what about ġesihtċiest? A ‘looking box’ by analogy with ‘looking glass’? Unless you have a flatscreen TV I suppose, in which case why not ġesihtbord?
It might be worth checking out how Zionists tackled these questions when they revived Biblical Hebrew. I keep meaning to, myself. All I know so far is that the Biblical verb for ‘descend’ is the basis for the Modern Hebrew noun for ‘parachute’ ( though apparently a loan-word from Italian is also used), that they use merkaba, the Biblical word for ‘chariot’, for ‘military tank’ ( much as I think the French recycled char) and that semantic shift has turned a Biblical word for ‘room’ into a Modern Hebrew word for ‘flat, apartment, digs; a kibbutznik’s private quarters’.
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The moral right of the author to be identified as a great big, helpful old Hector has been asserted [ insert emoticon for the floppy-ear trick here].
PS: On a curious side note, the word ‘saloon’ for “a car with an enclosed body and separate boot” ( OED, viz, almost all of them nowadays) entered UK English from the United States, adapted from ‘saloon’ as in ‘the sort of bar cowboys hang out in, with the tinkly piano and the good-time girls, playing poker until the shady guy with five aces starts the gunfight’ which, in turn, the Americans borrowed from French ‘salon’, which amongst other things means ‘room’ and usually just does. Yet it is not derived from Latin. Oho, no. It is derived from the Frankish dialect of Old High German and/ or an Old Franconian word related to Old English poetic sæl for ‘hall’ and sælor for ‘hall, palace’ as well as to Modern German Saal and Modern Dutch Zaal for ‘hall, assembly room, ( large) room,’ and sundry cognates in these and other Germanic languages.
This is a point worth labouring when confronted with Francophiles and Classicists with a superiority complex, and/ or an attitude about “rude Saxons” and the like.
PPS: Fans of Philip Pullman will recall the Zaal at Wisbech in the Fens, which was once a port, in which his imaginary Gyptian people gathered for their byanroping in Northern Lights before disembarking for Bolvangar ( and not just flush Lyra straight into the North Sea, as in the film). Dutch people helped drain the Fens and settled here, where we have a few Dutch barns, windmills ( an old one was used for storage in my home village) and Spalding used to have a tulip festival, so the Dutch admixture to Pullman’s Gyptians is eminently plausible. One of my uncles has a Dutch surname ( Addlesee) and, owing to a fitful debate in my family as to whether we have Jewish or Gypsy blood in our veins from way back ( Wisbech has a reputation as “the Gypsy capital of East Anglia” owing to all the crop-pulling, so that’s also plausible) I may be a bit of a real-life Gyptian, myself.
