færbu
Old English
Etymology
This is a ghost word resulting from a misinterpretation of two words, fær (“movement, demeanour”) and bū (“both”), as one; the origin of which appears to be Samuel Fox's King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of Boethius,[1] which Bosworth & Toller's An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary[2] then cited. The sequence appears in the poetic verse "... habbað blīoh and fær bū unġelīċe" ("... (they) have appearance and demeanor, both unlike"), which would be metrically deficient, per the rules of Old English Meter,[3] if bū were not part of the off verse and stressed such that it can alliterate with blīoh. In any case, færbu could not be the reflex, by regular sound change, of Proto-Germanic *farwō, whence German Farbe, the latter of which seems to be the basis of this misinterpretation.
Noun
færbu ?
References
- ^ Tupper, M. Farquhar., Fox, S., Alfred, K. of England. (1901). King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of Boethius De consolatione philosophiae: with a literal English translation, notes, and glossary., https://books.google.com/books/about/King_Alfred_s_Anglo_Saxon_Version_of_Boe.html?id=sqYnB_qNr78C, page 352
- ^ Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller (1898) “FÆRBU”, in An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ^ Fulk, Robert D., Pope, John C. (2001), Eight Old English Poems, →ISBN, pages 129-158
- Angus Cameron, Ashley Crandell Amos, Antonette diPaolo Healey, editors (2018), “fær”, in Dictionary of Old English: A to I
, Toronto: University of Toronto, →OCLC.
