11 Jul
2016
11 Jul
'16
9:13 p.m.
On 2016-07-11 13:07, John Cowan wrote:
Johnny Billquist scripsit:
Of course I was being silly. :-)
But I was having a hard time remaining serious under the circumstances.
So the obvious question then becomes: Are you
saying that Old
English also borrowed the word from English?
Now you're being silly. It's obvious that "boat" is a cuckoo in the
Scots nest, and who could have laid it there but English? Scots is shot
through with English borrowings, just as the Nordic languages are full
of Low German and English is full of Old Norse and French. For an example of a Scots word that went the other
way, consider OE
rád, which meant 'an event of riding'. In Beowulf, the sea is called
(among other poetic things) the swanrád, the place of the swan's riding.
According to the sound-change I discussed before, this becomes ModE road,
which is now specialized to mean 'the place where people usually ride
(or used to)'. In Scots, however, it took the meaning of a 'riding for
military purposes', and as the sound change predicts, its form is raid,
which was borrowed into English in the 19C (by Sir Walter Scott).
Etymonline is an excellent resource, but not entirely perfect, and it
happens to be wrong in this case about the related languages (which is
not its focus anyway). The OED3 has the same story I gave you, with
some doubt about a few details; <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%A5d>
agrees also.
So you're staying that the Old English "bat" according to Etymonline is
incorrect? So are you then saying that the Old English word was "boat"?
Because what you said was that "boat" was the original word, and all
other derivations are in fact borrowed from English.
The Old English word should be easy to verify...
Johnny