i believe that i can trace the origin of the word "thrembo" all the way to english's earliest ancestor language, proto-indo-european.
as you probably know,
no records exist for the etymology of thrembo. but that doesn't mean that it can't be reconstructed.
the english language descends from old english, which itself descends from proto-west-germanic, which itself descends from proto-germanic, which itself descends from proto-indo-european. this establishes a clear timeline of the evolution of the word thrembo, but this assumes that thrembo is a native english word. this is, however, extremely likely, as all numbers from one to 999,999 are native english words.
now, enough rnca, how can we reconstruct the word?
simple. we can take two other native english words that contain the same set of phonemes. the ones i will be using are "thresh" and "kemp". why "kemp" instead of a word that ends with -mbo like thrembo? wiktionary lists a potential etymology of the word "crambo" as coming from the word "cramp", so we can assume that, following this pattern, the (middle english?) form of thrembo was something like thremp*.
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