Hi everyone, welcome to this bonus episode of the History of English Podcast.

I prepared this short bonus episode because other commitments have kept me from completing

the next regular episode, those commitments basically being the fact that I'm moving.

So with very limited time available, I decided to put together a mini episode to fill in

the gap until episode 64.

As it turned out, I had a few bits and pieces of etymology that I left out of episode 61,

where I discussed Anglo-Saxon peasants in farming.

So I'm going to discuss that material here.

Now previously, when I was discussing Anglo-Saxon peasants, I mentioned a few old English words

for farm animals.

But there were a lot of other animal words which I didn't have time to get to, so let's

take a look at those words.

And let me begin by noting that most of our modern words for common animals can be traced

back to Old English.

And this confirms the idea that words within our core vocabulary, which we learn as small

children, tend to hang on and survive over time, while other words are more likely to

come and go.

So the words which we use for common animals tend to be very old words, and many of them

go back to the Anglo-Saxons.

So as we've seen before, the word wolf goes back to Old English, and in fact it was a very

common name element.

So we saw that the name Beowulf was the B-Wulf, the B-Hunter.

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