Re: English oddities

On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> Mangiat wrote:
>
> > I was wondering in the last days where the word 'TIME' is from.
>
> It's a borrowing from Old Norse.  There are many such words that have
> been borrowed and then semantically differentiated from their native
> counterparts: time and tide, skirt and shirt, etc.
Ooh, let me guess.  "shirt" from old English (that sc thing, which I
*adore* incidently as more aesthetically appealing than sh), and skirt
from either Old Norse or German.

Is "tide" old English?  I can't remember the word for "time" in OE (been a
while since I had to read any of it, you know, and it's amazing how
quickly you forget a dead language, especially one you never learned very
well to begin with).

                Living your life is a task so difficult,
                it has never been attempted before.