The science of etymology

by Walter W. Skeat

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1912 edition. ...or sudden gust of wind; grabbeln, to seize; hiissen, to hush to sleep; klauen, a clew of yarn; kley, clay; klotern, to clatter; Muster, a bunch of hair; Mute, a clot; krakken, to crack; losig, lazy; raren, to roar; rateln, to rattle; rysen, to rise; schell, husk of fruit; sellen, to sell; slabbern, to slabber, as ducks do with their bills in water; slick, sludge; slump, a mishap; smoden, to smoothe; splyten, to split; stake, a stake; stubbe, a stub, stump; swymen, to be giddy (as when one's head swims); to taltern ryten, to tear to tatters; trampen, to trample; trippeln, to trip along; trondeln, to roll, trundle; tubbe, a tub; tilss, tush!; wicht, a wight, a creature; wygelwageln, to be unsteady, to wiggle-waggle; wyren, wires; wrack, a wreck; wrickeln, to wriggle; wringen, to wring; written, the wrists, or the ankles. § 101. Of course, in many of these cases, the Low G. word is merely cognate with the English, as we find A. S. blyscan, to blush, dysig, foolish, dizzy, dryge, dry, &c.; and again, O. Norse bylgja, a billow, &c.; but these continental forms are extremely useful for comparison, and in some cases there is no trace of any corresponding term in Early English. The word flabby is first used by Dryden, and even the older form flappy does not occur till 1598; no doubt it is of imitative origin, from the verb to flap. In such a case the various allied continental forms afford useful evidence. Flaw, in the sense of ' a gust of wind ', is almost certainly a sailor's word; it is not found before 1513, and was probably borrowed from the Swed. flags (Widegren), sometimes used in this sense; and the Hamburg flage is just the same word. Lazy is no older than 1549, and I can find no sure connexion between it and any word of...

270 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 27, 2015

About the author

Walter William Skeat, English philologist, educated at King's College School (Wimbledon), Highgate School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in July 1860. The noted palaeographer T. C. Skeat was his grandson.

In 1878 he was elected Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge. He completed Mitchell Kemble's edition of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, and did much other work both in Anglo-Saxon and in Gothic, but is perhaps most generally known for his labours in Middle English, and for his standard editions of Chaucer and Langland's Piers Plowman.

As he himself generously declared, he was at first mainly guided in the study of Chaucer by Henry Bradshaw, with whom he was to have participated in the edition of Chaucer planned in 1870 by the University of Oxford, having declined in Bradshaw's favour an offer of the editorship made to himself. Bradshaw's perseverance was not equal to his genius, and the scheme came to nothing for the time, but was eventually resumed and carried into effect by Skeat in an edition of six volumes (1894), a supplementary volume of Chaucerian Pieces being published in 1897. He also issued an edition of Chaucer in one volume for general readers, and a separate edition of his Treatise on the Astrolabe, with a learned commentary.

His edition of Piers Plowman in three parallel texts was published in 1886; and, besides the Treatise on the Astrolabe, he edited numerous books for the Early English Text Society, including the Bruce of John Barbour, Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, the romances of Havelok the Dane and William of Palerne, and Ælfric's Lives of the Saints (4 vols.). For the Scottish Text Society he edited The Kingis Quair, usually ascribed to James I of Scotland, and he published an edition (2 vols., 1871) of Chatterton, with an investigation of the sources of the obsolete words employed by him.

He is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

Reviews

[Van Corey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave up on this edition, given all the typos in it. It appears the problem with it is that it may be an OCR version of an older book. I looked up the original on Internet Archive and found one of the errant passages and it was much clearer to read the original scanned copy. Unfortunately, the errors in this edition caused the text to the meaning of the passage. I am marking this book as READ in my library, but in truth I was unable to finish it.