Re: [TUHS] Boats (was: Slashes)

Johnny Billquist scripsit: 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. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and all other acyclic graphs; you have a right to be here. --DeXiderata by Sean McGrath