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