Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/24

 Philologists who have investigated the history of the British language all agree that in the first century the British form of the compound meaning 'lake-fort' would have been Lindudūnon, and that of the compound meaning 'ship-fort' would have been Longodūnon. Now since, as I have just said, the Romans did not 'corrupt' the Celtic names which they wrote down, it is obvious that neither of these forms will account for 'Londinium'. There is another fatal objection to the interpretation 'ship-fort', viz. that the British word longā, a ship, is known to be an adoption of the Latin navis longa, and would therefore be unlikely to occur in the name of a British city as early as the time of Tacitus.

We have to accept the form Londinion as it stands, without any lawless meddling with its consonants or vowels. What is certain about it is that it is not a compound; that is to say, it contains one root and not two. It is derived from a word londos (or londā, londi, &c.; the declensional syllable is uncertain) by the successive addition of two suffixes, -ino- and -io-, which originally served to form adjectives. M. D'Arbois de Jubainville has conjectured that Londinion, properly the neuter of an adjective, means 'the place belonging to a man named Londinos', and that this personal name is derived from londos, a word that survives in Irish as lonn, savage, wild. This guess seems to be the only one hitherto offered that has the merit of being philologically possible. The meaning given to the assumed personal name is not inconceivable, when we remember that in early times such words as 'bear' and 'wolf' were continually used in the formation of names of men and even of women. Still, we must not suppose that this explanation of the name Londinion is certain, or anything near it. There may have been other words of the form lond- besides the one that survives in Irish, and even that word may have greatly changed its meaning. It may be that Londinion does mean 'the place of Londinos', and yet that the word from which