BTW, another language oddity. Words for colors didn’t appear all at once, so that, for example, there’s no reference to the color blue in Homer’s Odyssey.
Well, maybe. I believe the sky is described as “bronze-colored” in a few places (might be in the Iliad). This is what weathered bronze looks like.
That’s actually evidence of Ancient Greek not having a word for “blue”. They use “X-colored” (where X is something blueish) instead of just using a single color word. It’s the same for the the ocean, which is always called “wine-dark sea” in the Iliad.
According to the Berlin-Kay color theory, there is a fixed order in which colors appear in languages:
“Dog” is an odd word. It just suddenly appears in Old English as “dogca” around 1000 AD, and gradually replaced “hound” as the general name for a canine. “Hound” became restricted to particular types of dogs
The odd thing is that “hound” has numerous cognates in other Germanic languages (e.g. “hund” in German). “Dog” has no known cognates, and no apparent history prior to 1000.
[QUOTE=Northern Piper;21582895…“Dog” has no known cognates, and no apparent history prior to 1000.[/QUOTE]
If there were an antecedent, would that be “dogma”? (And the lost “dogpa”?) 
I think that’s evidence of pre-contact visits from the Australian Mbabaram.
Move to Spanish, and the dog mystery continues–perro is also of unknown origin and has no proven cognates.
My guess about dogs.
Today we have poodles and oodles of other dog breeds: labs, beagles, huskies, cockers, spaniels, boxers, collies, terriers, etc. So many breeds that a clear-cut generic word is needed.
[wild speculation] But what was the situation when Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain? Or Romans arrived in Spain? There were probably only a few breeds, all different from what the invaders were used to, and just one of which would be especially prized by the invaders. The breed name (‘dogca’ or ‘perro’), probably from the indigenous language, would become the word of choice, and would soon become a generic word. We’d have little chance of guessing the etymology now for what started as just the name of a particular breed.
I also like the kohen / kahuna idea that Hawaii was first settled by Jews. Not as striking as the dog similarity, but still pretty neat.
The ‘w’ in Hawaii is pronounced as ‘v’ in native Hawaiian, just as it is in Yiddish. A coincidence? …Well, probably so.
Bird also is odd. It is derived from Old English brid for a young bird, but does not have cognates in other Germanic languages. It is of unknown origin and relationships. The common Old English term for bird was fugel, which became fowl, with obvious cognates in Dutch and German vogel.
Not a coincidence at all. The sound in both cases precedes the letter, Hawaiian having been an unwritten language, and Yiddish being written in Hebrew script. Transliterations of both languages into the Latin alphabet were constructed by people who already used the Latin alphabet, who were culturally quite closely related to one another.
With Hawaiian, the issue is not “why is -w- pronounced with ‘v’ sound?”, but rather “why did the transliterators choose -w- to represent this sound?”
No, until people started talking about it in English, which would be equal to the time English started existing. Sermons, catechesis, etc. were in the vernacular. Also note that Jews, a group which unlike its goyim neighbors was generally literate, would usually read the Bible in a language much older than Latin but speak with the neighbors in whatever the neighbors spoke.
(I was trying to play off of the ridiculous idea that Hawaii was first settled by Jews. I missed.)