From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: bqt@update.uu.se (Johnny Billquist) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 14:04:38 +0200 Subject: [TUHS] Boats (was: Slashes) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <26a26c98-d521-e813-090b-42e199ff93e6@update.uu.se> On 2016-07-10 02:52, John Cowan wrote: > Steffen Nurpmeso scripsit: >> > "Die Segel streichen" (Taking in the sails), > "Striking the sails" in technical English. All the nations around the > North and Baltic Seas exchanged their vocabularies like diseases, and if > we didn't have records of their earlier histories, we would know they > were related but we'd never figure out exactly how. For example, it > can be shown that French bateau, German Boot, common Scandinavian båt, > Irish bád, Scottish Gaelic bàta, Scots boat, and the equivalents in > the various Frisian languages are none of them original native words: > they all were borrowed from English boat. Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which means they all share a common root. What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from English? I would guess/suspect that the term is older than English itself, and the similarity of the word in the different languages comes from the fact that it's old enough to have been around when all these languages were closer to the roots and each other. Boats have been around for much longer than the English language so I would suspect some term for them have been around for a long time too... If you ask me, you all got most terms from the Vikings anyway, who were the first good seafarers... :-) (I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...) Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol