This Wordorigins.org post by ᴚǝǝƶɐʍɐɈ is full of language sites I hadn’t known about, most of which I won’t use enough to put on the sidebar but which some of my readers may be glad to have on hand, so here are the links — you can read more about them at the linked post:
Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, now freely accessible at ΛΟΓΕΙΟΝ (see the About page).
Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität (I did add this one to the sidebar).
Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini (not yet complete).
Corpus Diacrónico del Español (just citations, no definitions).
AlWaraq.net (“does for medieval Arabic what CORDE does for medieval Spanish”).
Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon.
Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie: Historische woordenboeken op internet.
Chronologisch woordenboek, which gives the date of first attestation of Dutch words, downloadable as a PDF here.
The last link was URL-escaped, Chronologisch woordenboek is here
The link for the Chronologisch woordenboek is http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/sijs002chro01_01/sijs002chro01_01.pdf
Would a kind soul tutor me on what sequence of buttons must I press to get the earliest citation (i.e order results by Año) in Corpus Diacrónico‘s Obtención de ejemplos?
Thanks, ???? and david: fixed now!
From WordOrigins: I used the above dictionaries and other online sources to show that the medieval word “scarlet” came from Germanic (best attested in High German). The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles is badly mistaken when it says “scarlet” came from medieval Persian. The early records of scarlet in Italy and Latin Iberia explicitly say it is a cloth imported from Belgium and the north of France (and nowhere else), the word’s early records in High German and British Latin are among the earliest records in Europe.
Heh! Something like *scarp-wlits ~ON skarp-litr “bright-coloured”? No, probably not given Lat. scarlatum. I guess *scar could be cognate with ON skör “cutitng, edge, seam, measure etc.” and *lata- the adjective that gave us ‘late’, orig. “soft, yielding”, i.e. something like “edge-lining”. MHG scharlach(en) etc. points to a compound with MDu lakan “woven textile”, but that looks more like a folk etymology.
Yeah, I wouldn’t trust that guy’s etymologies, but his resources are great.
Those etymologies were mine, not his. But don’t trust them anyway.
Yeah, but you seemed to be proceeding from his “I used the above dictionaries and other online sources to show that the medieval word ‘scarlet’ came from Germanic,” and I’m just saying I wouldn’t put any faith in that. If it spurs you to come up with an etymology, though, I’ll put a lot more credence in that!
@leoboiko:
The relevant selector is ‘Clasificación’, in the last section ‘Obtención de ejemplos’. It doesn’t work for queries that yield more than 1000 hits, though, because you can’t get a concordance display for them.
What I often end up doing is setting a more or less arbitrary end date to reduce the number of hits, but it’s an awful kludge forced by one of the worst search frontends I’ve ever seen.
(Incidentally, CORDE has a sister corpus with 1975–2004 data, the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA).)
@Alon Lischinsky ¡thanks!