An Etymological Dog Kennel, or Dog Eat Dog: Icelandic setja upp við dogg, Engl. to lie doggo, Engl. dog, and Engl. it’s raining cats and dogs

There is a rare slangy British English phrase to lie doggo “to lie hid”. The earliest known example is dated in the OED to 1882. Doggo looks like dog + o (with -o, as in weirdo, typo, and so forth), but a formation consisting of an animal name followed by the suffix -o would have no analogs. Some light on the origin of lie doggo may fall from the Modern Icelandic idiom sitja upp við dogg ‘to sit or half-lie, supporting oneself with elbows’. Doggur, known from texts since the eighteenth century, occurs with several other verbs. Also, sitja eins og doggur ‘sit motionless, look distraught’ and vera eins og doggur ‘to be motionless’ exist. Doggur has nothing to do with dogs, because the Scandinavian word for “dog” is hund-. The origin of the English noun dog is obscure, but, contrary to the almost universal opinion, the word is not totally isolated. In some German dialects, the diminutive forms dodel, döggel, and the similar-sounding tiggel ~ teckel occur. Perhaps dog and its continental look-alikes were originally baby words. The same sound complexes as above sometimes mean ‘a cylindrical object’ (such are Icelandic doggur and Middle High German tocke). Two of the basic meanings of those words were probably ‘round stick; doll’. Although the evidence is late, we can risk suggesting that lie doggo also contains the name of some device that was current not too long ago in the European itinerant handymen’s lingua franca. The overall image looks nearly the same as in the phrase dead as a doornail. In English, folk etymology connected doggo with the animal name and misled even professional lexicographers and etymologists. Finally, of some relevance is the English idiom it rains cats and dogs, whose forgotten earliest form was it rains cats and dogs and pitchforks with their points downwards. Apparently, the original idea was that a downpour of sharp objects fell to the ground

Þjalfi

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Are the Scandinavian Gods of Indo-European Heritage?

The origin of Germanic deities poses the question familiar from the study of phonemes, grammatical forms, and syntactic constructions: Indo-European heritage or local descent? Since from medieval Germania only Scandinavian mythology has come down to us, discussion centers around Othin, Thor, Týr, Baldr, etc. None of them has ascertainable roots in Indo-European, even when etymology points in that direction. Nor has George Dumézil succeeded in showing that the Indo-European and the Scandinavian pantheon, with their alleged tripartite division, are a good match, but from the nature of the case the question remains open

Boris Oguibénine, L’héritage du lexique indo-européen dans le vocabulaire russe. Première série : compléments au dictionnaire étymologique de la langue russe de Max Vasmer

People never stop asking questions about word origins, and publishers try to satisfy their curiosity. Given the demand, most books on this subject are popular. Their authors are usually amateurs who recycle the information from the easily available sources, including the Internet. They provide entertainment, disguised by a veneering of scholarly terminology. In the mass of that production, one occasionally finds condensed one volume etymological dictionaries by professionals whose goal, howev..

New etymologies in Thomas O. Lambdin’s An Introduction to the Gothic Language

In 2006 Thomas O. Lambdin brought out An Introduction to the Gothic Language. Every lesson is followed by vocabulary notes that include etymologies. Most of them were borrowed from well-known dictionaries, but a few are new. The paper contains comments on those etymologies

My life in etymology

“My life in etymology” is a story of a new etymological dictionary of English. The essay tells of how the project began and developed and how work on the dictionary engulfed its originator and became the culmination of his career in philology

A few samples from the A-section of the prospective Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology (ache, akimbo, aloof, and askance)

Ache, akimbo, and askance are words whose etymology has not been discovered despite numerous attempts to trace their initial form and country of origin. By contrast, the derivation of aloof is known, but it is instructive to watch researchers’ groping in the dark for more than two centuries and sometimes even now looking for a better solution. The etymologies offered below are entries in my prospective dictionary of English etymology. Each of them opens with an abstract of its own

Prosodic structure and suprasegmental features:Short-vowel stød in Danish

This paper presents a phonological analysis of a glottalization phenomenon in dialects of Danish known as ‘short-vowel stød’. It is argued that both short-vowel stød and common Danish stød involve the attachment of a laryngeal feature to a prosodic node—specifically the mora. In the case of short-vowel stød that mora lacks segmental content, as it is projected top-down due to local prosodic requirements, not bottom-up by segmental material. I show that this device provides an account of the distribution of short-vowel stød as arising from the interplay of constraints on metrical structure (both lexically stored and computed by the grammar) and the requirement for morae to be featurally licensed. The analysis provides further evidence for the analysis of ‘tonal accents’ and related phenomena in terms of metrical structure rather than lexical tone or laryngeal features, and contributes to our understanding of the relationship between segmental and suprasegmental phonology in Germanic languages