Excerpt from The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe: And More Especially of the English and Lowland Scotch and of Their Slang, Cant, and Colloquial Dialects Though the Britains [britons] or W'elsh were the first possessors of this island, whose names are recorded, and are therefore in civil history always considered as the predecessors of the present inhabitants yet the deduction of the English language from the earliest times of which we have any knowledge to its present state, requires no mention of them for we have so few words which can with any probability be referred to British roots, that we justly regard the Saxons and Welsh as nations totally distinct. It has been conjectured that when the Saxons seized this country, they suffered the Britons to live among them in a state of vassalage, employed in the culture of the ground and other laborious and ignoble services. But it is scarcely possible that a nation, however depressed, 'should have been mixed with another in considerable numbers, without some communication of their tongue and therefore it may, with great reason. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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This work introduces renowned linguistics scholar Anatoly Liberman's comprehensive dictionary and bibliography of the etymology of English words. The English etymological dictionaries published in the past claim to have solved the mysteries of word origins even when those origins have been widely disputed. An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology "by contrast, discusses all of the existing derivations of English words and proposes the best one. In the inaugural volume, Liberman addresses fifty-five words traditionally dismissed as being of unknown etymology. Some of the entries are among the most commonly used words in English, including man, boy, girl, bird, brain, understand, key, ever, " and yet." Others are slang: mooch, nudge, pimp, filch, gawk, " and skedaddle." Many, such as beacon, oat, hemlock, ivy," and toad," have existed for centuries, whereas some have appeared more recently, for example, slang, kitty-corner, " and Jeep." They are all united by their etymological obscurity. This unique resource book discusses the main problems in the methodology of etymological research and contains indexes of subjects, names, and all of the root words. Each entry is a full-fledged article, shedding light for the first time on the source of some of the most widely disputed word origins in the English language. "Anatoly Liberman is one of the leading scholars in the field of English etymology. Undoubtedly his work will be an indispensable tool for the ongoing revision of the etymological component of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary."" --Bernhard Diensberg, OED" consultant, French etymologies Anatoly Liberman is professor of Germanic philology at the University of Minnesota. He has published many works, including 16 books, most recently Word Origins . . . and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone."