Talk:List of English words with dual French and Old English variations

native speacres
neither byspel nor athel are modern English words. Can't check the rest of it but the list could grow huge if started posting all the words that have changed since the beowulf poet was writing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.216.186.228 (talk) 07:47, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

more words
how about likeness - similarity, resemblance get - obtain, acquire

or maybe gain... and tonnes of others???

Citation to Transactions of the New Zealand Institute
At the moment, the article cites six "food" pairs (ox/beef, sheep/mutton, etc.) to a 1901 paper published in the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute (vol. 34), namely "A Philological Study in Natural History". Having gone and found the article in question, I have two problems with this. Firstly, it's an odd place to go for a citation. Why this paper in particular? Isn't there some better, less obscure source out there? And secondly, the paper is not actually about Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman pairs. It talks about a great many terms for different animals, but it barely touches on the ones that it's used to cite here. In fact I need to have another look through, because I'm sure that several of them are entirely absent.

Thirdly, and not really an argument about this particular use, but the paper is nonsense. He says that English deer is cognate with Latin fera, Greek ther; this may have been plausible at the time, but it's not supported by modern work. He says the female deer is called a "hind" because it followed behind the male; this was nonsense even at the time. He says Latin bellua "beast" is the origin of Latin bellum, English bell, bull; what?! Are we sure this isn't actually an April Fool's Day joke that got out of hand? -- Perey (talk) 13:31, 9 September 2021 (UTC)