{"id":6318,"date":"2024-01-04T02:48:42","date_gmt":"2024-01-04T02:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/?p=6318"},"modified":"2024-01-04T02:52:03","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T02:52:03","slug":"word-of-the-day-deor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/2024\/01\/04\/word-of-the-day-deor\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Day Deor"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Today\u2019s word of the day, thanks to the Old English Wordhord website, (https:\/\/oldenglishwordhord.com\/<\/a>), is deor<\/em>, an Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) noun meaning \u201can animal.\u201d According to www.etymonline.com<\/a>, deor<\/em> came \u201cfrom Proto-Germanic *deuzam<\/em>, the general Germanic word for \u2018animal\u2019 (as opposed to man), but often restricted to \u2018wild animal\u2019 (source also of Old Frisian diar<\/em>, Dutch dier<\/em>, Old Norse dyr<\/em>, Old High German tior<\/em>, German Tier<\/em> \u2018animal,\u2019 Gothic dius<\/em> \u2018wild animal.\u2019\u201d The website says that in Middle English the noun could also refer to ants and fish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Further, the etymology says, \u201cThis is perhaps from PIE *dheusom<\/em> \u2018creature that breathes, from root *dheu<\/em>– (1) \u2018cloud, breath\u2019 (source also of Lithuanian dusti<\/em> \u2018gasp,\u2019 dv\u0117sti<\/em> \u2018gasp, perish;\u2019 Old Church Slavonic dychati<\/em> \u2018breathe\u2019). For possible prehistoric sense development, compare Latin animal from anima<\/em> \u2018breath\u2019).\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there\u2019s a third paragraph. \u201cThe sense specialization to a specific animal began in Old English (the usual Old English word for what we now call a deer was heorot<\/em>; see hart<\/a>), was common by 15c., and is now complete. It happened probably via hunting, deer being the favorite animal of the chase (compare Sanskrit mrga<\/em>– \u2018wild animal,\u2019 used especially for \u2018deer\u2019).\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So we need to talk about the principle of semantic change called specialization or narrowing. Specialization refers to a process by which a word that refers to a broad category of signifiers gradually narrows in meaning to something fairly specific. There are lots of examples in English. For instance, the sense of OE scyrte<\/em> was generally of a garment, but the meaning narrowed to refer to a specific type of garment, ModE\u2019s shirt<\/em>. Other examples are OE mete<\/em> (\u201cmeat\u201d), which meant just food (as in \u201csweetmeats\u201d or \u201cmincemeat\u201d), OE steorfan<\/em>, meaning \u201cto die,\u201d which in ModE is starve<\/em>, and OE nowghty<\/em>, meaning \u2018having nothing,\u2019 which is ModE naughty<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The opposite of narrowing is broadening or semantic generalization. One classic example of broadening is the use of the word Kleenex<\/em> to mean any facial tissue. Kleenex is a brand name, not a common noun. One does not buy Puffs Kleenex but Puffs tissue. But the meaning of Kleenex<\/em> has broadened. The meaning of many words related to body parts have broadened: the heart of a problem, the shoulders of the highway, the hands of a clock, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I went to Old English for today\u2019s word in part because on this day in 1892 the English writer John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the most famous writer of high fantasy in the English language. The Hobbit<\/em> and The Lord of the Rings <\/em>trilogy virtually created the fantasy literature genre in the twentieth century. There were writers of fantasy literature before Tolkien, like George MacDonald, but Tolkien is the one who influenced future writers more than anyone and made fantasy literature okay for adult readers. By an historical accident, he also created the tendency to tell fantasy stories in trilogies. The accident was the scarcity of paper during World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to being a writer of fantasy, Tolkien was a philologist. Philology<\/em> comes from a Greek word meaning \u201clove of word,\u201d but it generally refers to the study of languages. And Tolkien loved languages, especially the old Germanic languages. In the 1920s he did a translation of the Old English poem Beowulf<\/em>, though that translation was not published until the 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tolkien actually invented languages before he started writing The Hobbit, and these languages appear in his fiction. He encouraged his students at Oxford, as well as his colleagues, like C. S. Lewis, to study the old Germanic languages. With Lewis and others, he started the Inklings, a group that met regularly, sharing their works with each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One thing that people may not know about Tolkien is that he was a lover of nature. He hated the sound of building, of cutting down of trees, and of cars. He and his friends took long walks through the English countryside. Tolkien was such a lover of nature that he created all kinds of flora and fauna in his fantasy writings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it\u2019s appropriate on Tolkien\u2019s birthday to think of the natural world around us, full of plants and deors<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image today is from Time and is a Tolkien frog, discovered in the Andes of Ecuador and named after J.R.R. Tolkien, perhaps in recognition of the author\u2019s love of nature (https:\/\/this-is-my-earth.org\/the-tolkien-frog-lives-in-the-tropical-andes-region\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today\u2019s word of the day, thanks to the Old English Wordhord website, (https:\/\/oldenglishwordhord.com\/), is deor, an Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) noun meaning \u201can animal.\u201d According to www.etymonline.com, deor came \u201cfrom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6320,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[472,238,395,129,471],"class_list":["post-6318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","tag-deer","tag-dictionary","tag-etymology","tag-language","tag-old-english","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6318"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6321,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6318\/revisions\/6321"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}