Page:An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language.djvu/236

Len lanca, hlanca, ‘hip, loins.’ For further details see under  and ; it is also perhaps allied to link,  ‘oblique’; hence   means ‘to direct obliquely or sideways’. It is also thought to be connected with lènkti, ‘to bend.’  , ( längess, längsing, Swiss langsi), from the   lęnze,  and, ‘spring’ (from the variants langeȥ, langeȥe);  lęnzo, lęnzī̆n, langiȥ, ; the loss of the g is normal, as in  and. lente, lęncten,, ‘spring,’  Lent. This West word was probably the term for spring, and Tacitus in the Germania seems to have a dim idea that it was used by the Teutons ( vár,  and Scotch wêr, North  ûrs, wos, represent the North  term  allied to  vêr,  ἔαρ,  vasar); for the other observations of Tacitus on the  divisions of time,   (also, which has supplanted the old word  in most of the modern  of Upper Germany; see an old Aryan term for  under ). The word is peculiar to ; it has not been authenticated in the non- languages; its meaning is therefore dubious. Some etymologists, misled simply by the similarity of sound, have connected with  ( laggs), and opined that it was so named from the lengthening of the days; such a derivation is at all events uncertain.   ,, ‘lark,’ from the  lē̆rche, from lêreche, lêwreche,  lêrahha, ; it is shown by the   leeuwerik,  lâwrice, lœ̂werce, lâwerce,  lark, Scotch laverock,  lœrikia, as well as the  variants lêwerich, lêwerech, lêwerch, that a fuller form would have been *lêwarahha in. The form cannot be determined with any certainty, nor can we say definitely whether the  and  words are compounds or simply unusual derivatives,  ,, from the  lërnen, ‘to learn’ (more rarely ‘to teach’),  lirnên, lërnên, ‘to learn’;   leornian,  to learn,  lînon for  *liznan ( *liznôda); an  derivative of the  of the    lais, ‘I know,’ discussed under  and ; hence  means ‘to become experienced, informed.’ The cognates of the stem lis fall into two classes; to one  belongs the sensuous notion ‘to go’ ( , , , and ), the other comprises the words , , and  leis, ‘knowing.’ ,, ‘to gather, glean, read,’ from lësen,  lësan, ‘to pick out, pick up, read,’ also ‘to narrate, relate.’  lisan, galisan, and  lesan, simply mean ‘to gather, collect’; from the latter  to lease is derived. So too in earlier lesa merely signifies ‘to collect, glean.’ There can be no doubt that this was the  meaning of  ; hence it is probable that the common  lesan, ‘to gather up,’ is connected with  lesù (lèsti), ‘to peck, pick up grains of corn.’ There is no relation between  lisan, ‘to gather,’ and lais, ‘I know,’ laisjan, ‘to teach’ (see, and ). The development of the meaning ‘to read’ from ‘to gather’ is indeed analogous to that of lego and  λέγω, which the  significations combine. Yet the state of culture affords a finer and wider explanation of, ‘legere’; since the modern term , ‘letter,’ is inherited from  times, when runic signs were scratched on separate twigs, the gathering of these twigs, which were strewn for purposes of divination, was  to ‘reading  the runes.’ Hence  lesan expressed the action described by Tacitus (Germ. 10) as “surculos ter singulos tollit;” in pre-hist. it also signified “sublatos secundum impressam ante notam interpretatur.” It is worthy of remark too that the  have no common term for ‘to read,’ and this proves that the art was not learnt until the Teutons had separated into the different tribes. It is also certain that runic writing was of foreign, probably of Italian origin. The Goth used the expressions siggwan, ussiggwan, ‘to read,’ the Englishman rœ̂dan,  to read; the former probably signified  ‘loud delivery,’ the latter ‘to guess the runic characters.’  , ‘(potter's) clay,’ from  lëtte,  lëtto,, ‘loam’ (ë is due to the  and  ); to this is probably allied the  graded form leþja, ., ‘loam, dirt.’ It is connected by some etymologists with  lŭtum, , ‘mud, dirt,’ and by others, less probably, with  laydis, ‘loam,’ whose diphthong, compared with the a of the  word, presents a difficulty. 