Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/172

160 instance, as well as a man's or woman's hat for the head. Another word I wish to notice is the termination ton or town, affixed to so many of our names of places. The word in this sense is not to be found in any other Teutonic dialect but the Anglo-Saxon, and the nearest approach to it is the old northern tun signifying area septa, and the Dutch tuin, sæpes, septum, hortus, the old High German Zun, sæpes, the Gothic tains, ramus, virga, Anglo-Saxon tan the same, and the Low Dutch teen the same. But in Anglo-Saxon tun never signifies a fence, and appears to me only a corruption of the Celtic dun a hill inhabited. The word still remains generally as the Downs all over England, and in combination with so many names of places, though in others corrupted to ton. Thus we have London, Maldon, Abingdon, Huntingdon, Swindon, Bleadon, Clevedon, Weldon; and in the immediate neighbourhood we have Assendon, Bovingdon, Checkendon, Croydon, Coulsdon, Hambledon, Hendon, Hillingdon, Hoddesdon, Horndon, Hunsdon, Quendon, Roydon, Waddesdon, Wimbledon. Many places are written variously don or ton, and many now ending in ton were originally written don — thus Islington was Yseldon.

Much however as the Lexicographers have passed over of the Celtic, there is another language of a people near us that they have entirely ignored. I refer to the Basques, of whom it has been well observed that our writers seem to know less than they do of our Antipodes. And yet I do not hesitate to say that this people not only for themselves and their language are deserving of the utmost attention from us, but also on account of the important influence they seem to have had somehow or other over the English as well as over the French and even Italian languages, and in a slighter degree over the Spanish. Often have I heard Spaniards speaking of words common to Bascayan and Spanish, say with that self complacency characteristic of the nation, that the Basques had borrowed them from the Spanish, whereas Philology, if they had known of it, would teach them that, if they had words not derived from the Latin, Arabic, Celtic, or Teutonic languages, but common to them with the Basques, then they must have been the borrowers themselves. In like manner, if we find, as we do many words in Italian which are not Latin, Celtic or Teutonic, but Basque, there must have been some ancient connection which it well becomes the scholar to investigate. And again if we find in the Latin many words which are neither Greek, nor Celtic, nor of any other known language, then we must repeat the