{"id":10972,"date":"2015-02-27T12:39:56","date_gmt":"2015-02-27T12:39:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=10972"},"modified":"2015-02-27T12:39:56","modified_gmt":"2015-02-27T12:39:56","slug":"twistles-and-forks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=10972","title":{"rendered":"Twistles and forks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There is a place in Lancashire in the north west of England called <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oswaldtwistle\">Oswaldtwistle<\/a> [\u02c8\u0252z\u0259l.tw\u026az\u0259l], which a friend went to after visiting me yesterday. Naturally, as we&#8217;re linguists, we wondered where the name Oswaldtwistle came from and what it might mean. My friend thought it might have something to do with <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oswald_of_Northumbria\">Saint Oswald<\/a>, who was King of Northumbria from about 604-642 AD.<\/p>\n<p>According to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oswaldtwistle\">Wikipedia<\/a> there is a legend that St Oswald passed though the area and gave his name to it. The twistle part comes from an old English word meaning &#8220;brooks meet&#8221;. Alternatively the village might been named after a local Oswald.<\/p>\n<p>The word twistle, which I really like the sound of, apparently means a boundary stream and literally means &#8220;double, forked&#8221;. It comes from the Middle English <em>twisel\/twisil<\/em>, from the Old English <em>twisla<\/em> (confluence, junction, fork of a river or road), from the Proto-Germanic <em>*twisil\u0105<\/em> (fork, bifurcation), from the Proto-Indo-European <em>*dwis-<\/em> (twice, in two). It is cognate with the German <em>Zwiesel<\/em> (fork). [<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/twistle\">source<\/a>. It also appears in the names Entwistle and Tintwistle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is a place in Lancashire in the north west of England called Oswaldtwistle [\u02c8\u0252z\u0259l.tw\u026az\u0259l], which a friend went to after visiting me yesterday. Naturally, as we&#8217;re linguists, we wondered where the name Oswaldtwistle came from and what it might mean. My friend thought it might have something to do with Saint Oswald, who was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,116,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-german","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}