[pastage]

> maelström

Good use of that word.

English has ae in Maelstrom but the contemporary word in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian is Malstrøm/Malström. I wonder when it lost it's ae, I see Mahlströmn from 1698, reading the etymology it says dutch but I wonder if they just wrote it down first. Everything about the sea is always filled with mythology.

I think social media needs a less poetic word though.

[schrijver]

I would say that the ae comes from Dutch, it was the way the open a sound used to be spelled before it became aa (maalstroom). You can still see it in place names (Aerdenhout which is pronounced Aardenhout).

[tokai]

It never had the ae in swedish and danish. Its from male/mala, to grind or to mill. English somehow changed it to ae, maybe through dutch where its maalstroom.

[pm215]

The OED agrees about the Dutch idea, giving the etymology as:

"early modern Dutch maelstrom (now maalstroom) whirlpool < malen to grind, to whirl round (compare meal n.1) + stroom stream n"

and also thinks Dutch is the origin, with Swedish/Danish etc taking it from Dutch too:

"The use of maelstrom as a proper name (also in French) seems to come from Dutch maps, e.g. that in Mercator's Atlas (1595). There is little doubt that the word is native to Dutch (compare synonymous German regional (Low German) Maling). It is true that it is found in all the modern Scandinavian languages as a common noun, but in them it is purely literary, and likely to have been adopted from Dutch."

[Aldipower]

We have that word in German too, so it seems to be present and understandable in all germanic languages. Not sure about Gothic though. :-)