Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/171

Rh boys among us would say take care of your shins. But the great deficiency that seems to me to exist in our Dictionaries is the neglect of searching into the languages of people around us for the derivation of many words which might thus have been properly explained, whereas for want of this knowledge or consideration they have had recourse to wild speculations and surmises equally wrong and ridiculous. Wherever they could find a pretext for a derivation from the Greek or Latin, it has of course been seized on as irrefragable. French in like manner and Italian has been a favourite, while what they call the Anglo-Saxon has been a trump or triumph card, carrying off every thing beyond contention. What however was the Anglo-Saxon but a mixture of the barbarous German then spoken by the rovers of the Continent with the Celtic dialects existing at the time in these islands, and hence it seems to me that the Lexicographers have not paid sufficient attention to the great and surprisingly great Celtic element in our language, in merging it too much in the Anglo-Saxon. Thus if we find in the Anglo-Saxon many, I may say hundreds of words which are not to be found in any other Teutonic dialect, but which are of the same import in the Cymric or Gaelic, then the inference seems clear that they were taken from the Celtic and ought to be so acknowledged. Among these may be included many of the commonest of modern English household words and even of almost all the articles of dress. It is true many of these are claimed as German, but it is only on the same principle of assumption above adverted to of giving some fanciful derivation at a venture, which for want of a better may be allowed to pass until at length it is received as indubitable. The words I refer to are such as hat, coat, glove, trousers, boots, gown, and perhaps some others. Gown is certainly stated as Welsh and Erse gwn, but hat is derived from the Saxon, and glove and others from the French by forced significations when they could have been directly traced to the Celtic. Thus glove is literally for the hand, as the Welsh now say amlaw, using the adverb am for where in the other dialect it is go. In like manner hat is connected with hutten to hut, as if the hat were a hut for the head, whereas the proper German word is shoe. This word I acknowledge to be German in all its ramifications — and thus they have handshoe for a glove, fingershoe for a thimble and headshoe for a hat. But the English word pronounced originally het as the Welsh do, is the Welsh word for a covering. The verb hatrer signifies to cover and the word het is any covering, a garland for