Speak like a Saxon: The internet

The highways and byways are teeming with messengers. All day long and well into the night they're carrying carefully-worded letters; love notes; recipes and paintings of ye cat dressed up like the king. That's right: the interwebs has come to Anglo-Saxon England.

I won't go into the techy detail of how the Anglo-Saxons created new words for foreign concepts here (you'd have to see my MPhil thesis for that and it's quite long). Anyway, here's one option for expressing 'internet':



Þæt betweonweb
Literally, the 'between-web'. Web can mean 'web' or also tapestry, so it's quite a nice word here.

["That be-tway-on-webb"]

Stay tuned for internet-related phrases next time.

*There are probably some of you out there who have your own new old words for 'internet' so do post your suggests in the comments box.


Comments

Unknown said…
I'd like to see your thesis.

I came up with Betwuxnett. But I also have genett and webb for "net" and "webb"