Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/79

 9* S.V.JAN. 27, im] NOTES AND QUERIES.

71

don. It is hardly necessary to say that the explanation is grammatically impossible.

The latter part of MR. SHORE'S letter is so good an example of the dangers of meddling with questions of philology without having undergone the requisite training that I will briefly examine it. A philologist would know that this change in Kentish is com- paratively late in date, and that it is, there- fore, impossible that MR. SHORE'S imaginary Kentish settlers in the upper Thames valley could have brought it with them. If he were acquainted with the chronology of the change from uioy (Kentish e\ he would have doubts as to the possibility independently of the late date of the Kentish change. If, however, he could lay aside these difficulties, he would examine, in the first place, the common words in the Abingdon Ohartulary, since their morphology is better known than that of local names. He would find, as he would have expected, that the language has regu- larly the West-Saxon ?/, not the Kentish e, to say nothing of other West-Saxon pecu- liarities. He would, therefore, waste no more thought over MR. SHORE'S theories. But in these columns one is not, unfortunately, addressing an audience with all of whom philological evidence has much weight, and it is, therefore, necessary to examine MR. SHORE'S examples further.

The astonishing thing about them is that MR. SHORE has not even taken the trouble to assure himself that they contain the vowel in question. He has simply taken any syllable ken, and assumed that it represents an umlauted u. The results are what might be expected from such uncritical recklessness. Kennington is derived not from Kentish ken cyn (from kunjo-), but from a distinct name- stem, viz., West-Saxon (&c.) cen (from koni-). The ken of Wacenesfeld has no other basis than MR. SHORE'S impossible division of the name. It is the name-stem wcec plus the hypocoristic suffix en. Lewkenor is a compound of the man's name Leqfeca and ora, and is accordingly recorded as O.E. Get Leofecan oran (' Cod. Dipl.,' iii. 293, 6). The fact that Chinnor commences with ch in modern English would prove to any one with an elementary knowledge of O.E. philology that there never was an umlauted u in it, since that vowel prevented palatalization and its consequences in English. That is why we say kin, and not chin, for O.E. cyn. Here I must leave MR. SHORE and his impos- sible theories.

With regard to the note of R. B. S., the derivation referred to by him is well known. It is really a creation of the imaginative

Leland in the sixteenth century. It arose from the mistaken notion that Thamesis, Thames, is a compound of the name of its affluent the Tharne and of an otherwise unknown he or Isis. For some strange reason, Leland Latinized the river-name Ouse as Isis, and this imaginary Isis, now repre- sented by the bogus alias of the Thames at Oxford, was accordingly seized upon by him as proof that the river was called the Ouse. In the spirit of his day he proceeded to derive Oxenaford from this non-existent Ouse * It was left for the seventeenth century to connect this hypothetical Ouse with the Irish uisce (not usque), and this and the un- related Welsh uisc nave in this century been adduced to explain the name of Oxford. These are a few specimens of the nonsense that has been produced by ingenious but ignorant writers in the attempt to prove that Oxford does not mean "the ford of oxen." The name of our great university seems to exercise as fatal an attraction for the unscientific etymologist as the candle does for the moth. ' W. H. STEVENSON.

'DR. JOHNSON AS A GRECIAN,' BY GEN- NADIUS (9 th S. iv. 451, 545). In a private but anonymous communication your corre- spondent "C., of Pall Mall" (sic), complains that, " in supposing that the Madame Vestris referred to by 0. was the person of that name who was born in 1797, I nave arrived at an erroneous conclusion." Now, C. had said that "her star did not shine in Johnson's time with the brilliancy of her father's." This could only refer to the daughter of one of the famous family of dancers. It is true that the "person born in 1797" was the daughter-in- law, not the daughter, of one of them ; but that, I thought, was a pardonable slip of C.'s. Well, I am now told that " the reference of C. was to another Madame Vestris of an earlier date and of equal reputation in her day." I am further informed in this letter that

" the record of the family is interesting, and MB. MARSHALL will find the details of its members set out in the French biographical dictionary immedi- ately to the left on entering the east door of the Reform Club Library [and only there?]. He will, on perusing the entries under Vestris in this work,

Hearne, ix. 71). It is greatly to the credit of Hearne's intelligence that he saw that this ety- mology was wrong, and that Oxenaford meant the ford of oxen (ib. iii. 135), although he mistakenly regarded this as an O.E. translation of the Welsh Rhydychein, whereas the latter is merely a translation of Oxena-ford. It is the regular name for Oxford in the ' Bruts.'
 * See his notes to ' Cygnea Cantio ' (' Itinerary,' ed.