the old english word for sneeze is
fnéosan
regrettably the o.e.d. does not venture a pronunciation. also, the much more stuffy (ie. latin) word for the same act is: sternutation.
Seeing Old English fnéosan, English sneeze, and Latinate sternutation makes me suspect there’s some Indo-European trickery going on here—i.e. do these all have the same root? Thus here’s a list of suspicious cognates for the sneezing reflex, sorted into Germanic and Italic languages:
- Danish nyse
- Dutch niezen
- Swedish nysa
- German niesen
- Old English fnéosan
- English sneeze
- Latin sternuere
- French éternuer
- Italian starnutire
- Spanish estornudar
The OED says that *pneu (“breathe”) is Indo-European root for the Germanic set. If you apply two iterations of Grimm’s Law to *pneu you get *fneu and then *neu, where /f/ reduces silence. The second set apparently has *pstrnu as its root (according to the OED), which I suspect shifted into *strnu. Thus, there are actually two roots, and they are similar in that both their reflex sets have /n/ and /s/.
