From this Facebook post by Sarah Thomason I learned the word hoghenhine; OED (entry revised 2010):
Law. historical.
A person who has stayed in a household for three nights, and so becomes the legal responsibility of the host; a member of a household; a dependant.1607 Hoghenhine, is he that commeth guestwise to a house, and lieth there the third night. After which time he is accounted of his familie in whose house he lieth.
J. Cowell, Interpreter sig. Mm2ᵛ/11630 He which commeth guest-wise to an house..the third night, is called an Hoghenhine (or Agenhine;)..and if he offend the Kings Peace, his Oast must be answerable for him.
M. Dalton, Countrey Justice (revised edition) xl. 981753 Agenhine, in our old writers, signifies a guest that has lodged at an inn for three nights, after which time he is accounted one of the family.
Chambers’s Cyclopædia Suppl. (at cited word)1848 The third night, an agenhinde, a domestic.
J. J. S. Wharton, Law Lexicon 662/21959 Agenhine, otherwise, but less correctly ‘Hogenhine’, and also ‘Third-night awne hine’, a guest at an inn, who having stayed there for three nights, was then accounted one of the family, and if he offended the king’s peace, his host was answerable for him.
Earl Jowitt & C. Walsh, Dictionary of English Law vol. I. 85/12007 The dulcet word hoghenhine..denotes a houseguest who stays more than two nights.
A. Freedman, Party of First Part 7
I’m not sure I’d call it dulcet, but it’s definitely a great word. And the etymology is interesting:
< early Middle English aȝen hine (also oȝen hine), lit. ‘own servant’, member of one’s own household < own adj. + hine, variant of hind n.² (see hind n.² 2), via representations of this early Middle English phrase in Latin and Anglo-Norman texts.
Notes
The following examples show various representations of early Middle English aȝen hine or oȝen hine in Latin and Anglo-Norman texts:a1175 (OE) Quodsi tercia nocte eum hospitatus fuerit.., habeat eum ad rectum tanquam de propria familia, nam Angli dicunt: tuo niht gest, þridde niht owen hine [c1175 MS Paris agen hewe, c1185 MS Rawlinson oghan hyþen, a1200 MS Lambeth agen hinen, c1300 MS Harley 746 agen hine, 1568 Lambarde Αρχαιονομια agen hine].
Leges Edwardi Confessoris: Version 2 (MS Holkham) xxiii. §1 in F. Liebermann, Gesetze der Angelsachsen (1903) vol. I. 648
[Composed OE]c1290 Soen hoste..la premere nuyt soit tenu pur estraunge..le autre nuyt geste, et la terce nuyt oune hyne.
Britton (1865) vol. I. i. xiii. §1. 49a1300–a1400 (a1268) Item, secundum antiquam consuetudinem dici poterit de familia alicuius qui hospitatus fuerit cum alio per tres noctes, quia prima nocte dici poterit uncuth, secunda vero gust, tertia nocte hoghenehine.
H. Bracton, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (1922) vol. II. 351 (Middle English Dictionary)
[Composed a1268]The expression was subsequently adopted from such texts in the 17th cent.
The addition of the h- is striking (note the wrist-slap in the 1959 citation); I wonder what prompted it? At any rate, the word provides a different angle on the “guests and fish” cliche.
So you only spend one night as a “guest”: you’re “uncouth”, in sense “stranger”, for the first night.
I see a medieval-themed inn slogan: “Not a guest house, a hoghenhine house!”
So if a gang of thieves (or other criminals) decided to stay at an inn for more than three nights, it was the owner of the inn who was considered to be legally responsible for their misdeeds?
The Forms section in the OED entry for ‘own’ has several spellings starting with h in its ‘β forms’ (which seems to be the ones that eventually lead to ‘own’ – ‘agen’ is an α form, an ancestor of ‘ain’).
If it’s rare enough then later uses of ‘hoghenhine’ could just have been copied from an early written use which used that version of the spelling.
“Family” used to mean “collective body of persons who form one household under one head and one domestic government, including parents, children, and servants, and as sometimes used even lodgers or boarders” [Century Dictionary, 1889]
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=family
Hypercorrect aspiration throwback during general h-dropping…? Or the boring option, a purely graphical hypercorrectivism after h-dropping.
No /h/ in eigen on the mainland.
Then in Arabic, there’s the ḍayfan, the guest of a guest, the guest a guest brings along with him. We should have a word for this in English.
the guest a guest brings along with him. We should have a word for this in English.
There is a word already. It’s plus-one.
Funny the things that stick in the memory… I have some children’s books that belonged to my father in the late 1910s, which I haven’t looked at for years. They contain a mixture of stories, factual articles, puzzles etc. and some snippets of curious information, one of which is about the term ‘third night awn-hinde’ (I think that is the spelling).
Google Books finds a lot of hits for that phrase.
Many of the hits from hat’s link attribute the “awn-hinde” rule to the “laws of [St.] Edward the Confessor.” Which probably means that there’s no source for it that doesn’t trace back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leges_Edwardi_Confessoris. Which the soreheads and haters claim is a 12th-century post-Conquest thing that was cynically intended to retcon certain Norman innovations as good old Anglo-Saxon traditions that the new regime was carefully respecting. I don’t have a sense of whether there’s any evidence it was a rule in actual effect subsequent to the 12th-century, but the phrasing of the mentions sort of implies probably not?
Relatedly, the rule pops up in the numerous different 17th-century editions of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Country_Justice, but not in a way that suggests it’s a currently-enforced one but as an IMHO somewhat labored analogy by Dalton to what he’s actually discussing at some length, which is the 17th-century rules for when someone is taken to have legitimately relocated from one parish to another — unauthorized relocation for bad motives was the sort of practice characteristic of Rogues and Vagabonds that the book’s intended audience needed to guard their communities against, plus since each parish was supposed to make some sort of provision for the relief of its own Poor, you needed to guard against attempts to make your parish support those Poor who ought to be some other parish’s obligation.
“Hávamál (35) discourses on the evils of staying too long in another man’s house, and the Jutes condemn the practice in their laconic proverb: en tredje dags gjæst stinker…”
From the commentary of Gabriel Turville-Petre’s edition of Víga-Glúms Saga, p. 63. He has a citation noting that he got the proverb from Gering & Sijmon’s Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda (vol. 1, p. 95, commenting on the Hávamál stanza in question), but Turville-Petre’s note is livelier.
Frisk fisk og liggende gæster holder kun tre dage is the version I know. Also the spelling with gj- dates your source to the mid-19th or so. (Standard Danish started down the same path of palatalization that Norwegian has carried to completion, IIRC from 1400 and forward, but by the start of the 19th it was almost gone again and the spelling followed a bit later, as usual, maybe in the second or third official orthography. Cf. Kjøbenhavn versus modern København).
Gering’s Liedern der Edda first appeared in 1888, but the edition with Sijmon as coauthor is from 1927 (after Gering died). But not updating the spelling of Danish from an even older source is excusable, I guess.
The Liedern is the edition of the actual text, which was first published in two parts, in 1888 and 1901. The Kommentar isn’t a new edition (though Gering did make a revised edition of the text, published in 1904 — I refer to this fairly often, since it’s unusually interventionist and is a good model for what a more reconstructive approach to the Eddic poems might look like), but a new follow-up volume (again in two parts, the first appearing in 1927).
Gering & Sijmons attribute the quotation to Henning Frederik Feilberg’s Bidrag til en ordbog over jyske almuesmål, vol. 1, p. 451, published 1886. But the version actually printed there is æn trirə daws gæst stjyɳkər (the ɳ obviously = IPA ŋ, confirmed in the intro, p. ix). I guess Gering converted it into the Danish orthography he was most familiar with. Per Wikipedia, the j was eliminated in words like this in 1889, but I think Gering would have learned his Danish before that, and may have either made the note already before the reform, and else held to the orthography he had first learned even later on.
Anyway, it’s a bit more complicated than simply not updating the orthography of an older source, but is otherwise indeed presumably very much an echo of the 19th century. Which is fitting, since Gering is as good a poster child as any for “19th-century” Germanic philology (very much including how much of his work was produced in the earlier 20th).
Gering’s Liedern der Edda
“Liedern” is dative plural (with “n”). The correct form here is the nominative plural, as in the ekshual subtitle: Die Lieder der sogenannten älteren Edda“.
‘Google Books finds a lot of hits for that phrase.’
Including the reference in question (‘Chatterbox’ on page 3).
As for the ‘stinking fish’ proverb; I have a miniature plate that my aunt must have brought home from a Spanish holiday. It says ‘Los huéspedes y la pesca, a los tres dias apestan’ so, having worked out the meaning, I always supposed that the proverb came from Spain!
Including the reference in question (‘Chatterbox’ on page 3).
Here’s a direct link (scroll down).
Liedern: The full title of the quoted work is Kommentar zu den Liedern…, but I’m sure I saw a mention of it as just Liedern … somewhere. Which made me go hmm, since it didn’t look very nominativish, but I decided that if they could do it, so could I.
æn trirə daws gæst stjyɳkər: That’s more or less impenetrable to a Standard speaker of my generation, or at least not reproducible. En tre dages gæst stinker is the literal translation. Not much of a difference, you might think, but very unpredictable. Especailly the extra syllable in trirə. What catches my eye is that the broad dialect seems to palatalize st but not g.
Kate’s Spanish version corresponds more closely to the version I learned. They are probably both translations of some Italian or French or English prototype.
just Liedern … somewhere. Which made me go hmm, since it didn’t look very nominativish, but I decided that if they could do it, so could I.
Many farmers manifest as Bauern, so if you stick to agriculture instead of music you won’t get shot down.
Offhand I would say that Bauer is pretty much the only masculine singular noun in -er that adds an -n in the plural. When it means farmer, that is. No -n is added when it means birdcage.
@stu
Isn’t Bauer one of these words like Mensch and Soldat that has this (e)n thing going on outside ns?
@pp
I guess. Probably. Didn’t think about systematics just now, don’t know much about them. I just have the Bauern example as a party trick. The case of the vanishing vowel in -(e)n, as you say. I stuck a mental red flag in the word decades ago.
Apparently, somebody has decided that today is Tag der deutschen Sprache.
Which works because nobody actually says Bauer instead of Käfig for “cage”… right?
Right, nobody’s feelings get hurt. Not a trace of misgendering or microaggression. There is safety in dad jokes.