[TUHS] Boats

[bqt@update.uu.se (Johnny Billquist)]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1851 bytes --]

On 2016-07-11 13:07, John Cowan wrote:
> Johnny Billquist scripsit:
>
>> 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.

Of course I was being silly. :-)
But I was having a hard time remaining serious under the circumstances.

> 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).
>
>> (See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=boat)
>
> 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