byrnie

[prettygoodword]

byrnie (BUR-nee) - n., a coat or shirt of mail, a hauberk.


May or may not be sleeveless -- the exact distinctions between a byrnie, hauberk, and haubergeon seem to have changed over the centuries and likely will never get cleared up. The word goes back to Old English brynja (which has Germanic cognates all over) and survived through Scots English.


Thanks, WikiMedia!

(What? -- I never said I wasn't going to do more Scots.)

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Plus, some French words like "hauberk" are themselves transformed Germanic, i.e. Frankish as in Lothar's Franconian rather than Charles's West Francian (thus we also have warden and guardian). I don't remember exactly what to do with the -berk part, but the hau- is hals, which survives in modern German to mean the neck.

[prettygoodword]

I knew hauberk is Frankish but I didn't that it's specifically Franconian -- nor indeed that we received any words that are specifically Franconian. Neat!

[thistleingrey]

Well, now I retrench: besides the Strasbourg Oaths, we don't have much from that region that early. I bet a proper linguist would Object Strenuously. But people certainly spoke and wrote between St Gallen and Corvey, where we do have things.

[prettygoodword]

And where we can differentiate from more western forms?

[thistleingrey]

hmm, Franconian as a C20/21 dialect area is not west of Corvey in Nordrhein-Westfalen. It's slightly east of Corvey, really, because it's northernmost Bayern and Baden-Württemberg as political entities go (Würzburg, Heilbronn). Sankt Gallen is across Bodensee from southernmost B-W; Reichenau (where things were also written down earlyish, though mostly just short glosses on Latin) is the near-to-modern-Germany side of Bodensee, also B-W. Middling B-W is my heritage dialect, which is why I have opinions. (Learning alt- and mittelhochdeutsch was far easier than it should've been, given my modern German's imperfections even then, because the vowels were familiar right up till we got to late mhd and moved northward.)

Anyway, if you drew a couple of horizontal lines across a map of Germany to include upper Bayern and B-W, then extended them westward, if anything you'd be slightly north of Strasbourg. We don't have proto-French attested that early outside the Oaths (most stuff was written down in Latin until insular French becomes a thing tempore Chanson de Roland and then bleeds back onto the Continent), so I'm a little confused by the "more western forms" part of the question.

[prettygoodword]

Er, I was speaking loosely, distinguishing Franconian from West Francian as above ...

[thistleingrey]

ah, sorry! To me, W Francia is a splinter of the proto-French state. Franconia is the teutophonic complement (easterly), which had its own political ID at times before the post-Napoleonic reorgs. Curious what your sense of it is.

[prettygoodword]

In a Frankish context, vague, but generally thought of as Carolingian areas west and east of the Rhine.

[thistleingrey]

I see. East of the Rhine has been predominantly Germanic-speaking for as long as we have any linguistic evidence until we run into the Huns and Slavs. That's... why the Strasbourg Oaths were agreed upon, isn't it?

[prettygoodword]

Pretty much, yeah, as I understand it.