ABSTRACT
The word in West Germanic had been the subject of a protracted controversy between E. Schroder and R. Much, neither of them really sufficiently at home in the Old English material some of which they used. Barbara Strang sums up what she accepts of the arguments for English: Occasionally borrowing can be traced between the Germanic languages. With such a rare word the authors can deduce very little from non-occurrence other than that it was not equally prominent in the minds of authors in the Germanic languages. This chapter returns to Barbara Strang: The chances of our being able to detect an inter-Germanic compound borrowing are extremely slender; the amount of evidence the authors indicates that these words must have wandered about a good deal between the various Germanic languages. Throughout the period, English contributed at least as much as it received in this matter.
