franc 91 wrote:
If it's not OT (ie not Irish) I can tell you that Dunkerque obviously is Flemish - Dunkirk - and it means the church of the (sand) dunes.
The first part (
dun-) is a common Indo-European word where Germanic and Celtic languages share an innovation in meaning. The root of the word,
*dʰeu̯h₂-, really meant ‘whirl through the air’ or something like that originally—the kind of flying movement that dust or sand would have. Most commonly, the root was expanded with a
*-mó- suffix (yielding
*dʰuh₂-mó-, which is an abstract noun based on the verb: ‘the thing what whirls through the air’, i.e., ‘smoke’. That’s the base of Greek
θύμος (‘thyme’ in English, which originally meant ‘spice for creating fume in sacrificial rites’) and Latin
fūmus (‘fume’ in English).
In the Germanic and Celtic languages, though, a different suffix,
*-nó-, was added, which yields a kind of medio-passive participle: ‘that which has been whirled through the air’ or ‘that which is in a state of having whirled through the air’, i.e., ‘sand’. The two branches share the shift from the plain ‘sand’ meaning to the meaning of a large bank of sand in particular (‘dune’), but from there, they split off:
In Germanic, the meaning either remained the same (as in ‘dune’ in English, which is a borrowing from Old Dutch), or it further developed to just any kind of bank or hill, which is what we have in ‘downs’ (as in rolling hills) in English (‘down’ is the native English development of the word that gave ‘dune’ in Old Dutch).
In Celtic, on the other hand, the word kept going, and came to mean the ‘enclosure’ or ‘area’ represented by a hill, as for building on; then anything built on a hill; and finally a building meant for defence (since these were often built on coastal hills, I guess), i.e., a stronghold or fortress (the current meaning of
dún in Irish and
din in Welsh, though the latter is somewhat obsolete, I believe).
Funny enough, at the time when it meant ‘sum area of a hill’ or something like that, the word was borrowed from Celtic back into German—and this was early enough that
Grimm’s law has still not operated, so very early indeed. Once Grimm’s law worked its magic on the Germanic proto-language, we ended up with a Celtic word
*dūnom borrowed into Germanic as a native-looking word
*tūn(a), meaning originally probably an ‘enclosure’ or ‘plot’ of land. In German, it has retained this meaning (
Zaun is the modern version, which is completely regular), but in English, after the Normans came along with their ways of dividing land and doing things, the meaning changed to a group of enclosures/plots in the same place; i.e., what has in English now developed into the word ‘town’.
It’s a very interesting root, how one can go from ‘whirl’ to ‘smoke’ to ‘sand’ to ‘hill’ to ‘enclosure’ to ‘fortress’/‘town’.
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Dieppe is different (a port I've often been to) - and yes the word does mean deep (water), but it is thought to be of Norman or Viking (Danish) origin and is definitely part of Normandy (Koko should know something about that).
The name ‘Dieppe’ wouldn’t be of Nordic origin—the
ie diphthong is a purely West Germanic outcome of the original
*eu-/*iu- diphthong. In the Nordic languages, this instead went from being a falling diphthong to a rising diphthong, i.e., it became
jú-; the Nordic forms are all based on Common Nordic
djúpr.
Whether the history of Dieppe (demographically/geographically) is Nordic in origin, I don’t know—I don’t know much, if anything, about Dieppe as a place …
Quote:
But (I'm not an expert on it) very little is known about the language spoken by the Gauls apart from the fact that it was Celtic.
Oh, the Gaulish language is relatively well-attested. We know a lot more about Gaulish syntax, grammar, and morphology than we do about Celtiberian, for example.
Quote:
And I've just remembered - the verb 'ouiller' and the word 'ouillette' which are dialect words in Burgundy - the first means to add water to/to water and the second is a watering can (wy in Welsh means water) - in standard French there's the verb - mouiller - which probably has the same origin.
I’ve never heard of
ouiller before, and I don’t know the etymology off-hand, but a quick Google search indicates that it was first used in the 13th century and originally meant ‘to fill a cask/barrel to the bung’, being then a denominative verb from the noun ‘bung’ (‘eye’ or
ueil in whatever stage of French the verb was created). It would therefore originally be from Latin
oculus ‘eye’.
My immediate guess for
mouiller would be that, as often happens, it represents a shift in meaning from ‘soft’ to ‘wet’ (or vice versa; cf. Danish
blød ‘soft’ vs. Swedish
blöt ‘wet’ vs. German
blöd ‘stupid’, from ‘soft/wet in the head’), and is originally simply a derivative of Latin
mollis ‘soft’ (
moux in Modern French). I don’t think it has anything to do with a Celtic word for water.
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