![]() Yet numerous well-known modern (!) adjectives, verbs, and nouns, summarily dismissed in dictionaries without explanation as slang, have no ascertained etymology. The process of formation must have been simple, even transparent, for people are not expected to create words out of nothing. The texts in which adesa appears owe nothing to the language of the Vikings, and indeed no similar word exists in Scandinavian. If the speakers of Old English had brought it to their new home from the continent, some related forms would probably have turned up in Frisian, Dutch, or German. Most likely, it was coined “locally” and had no currency outside England. Via Wikimedia Commons.Īs mentioned at the end of the previous post ( March 18, 2020), adz has no established cognates, even though it is an old word. They are more or less predictable and shed no light on the origin of our word. A few other dialectal forms of adz are also known. The form atch turned up in the seventeenth century, and some people who said an adz occasionally made the by now familiar mistake of misdivision and turned an adz into a nadz (see the examples of such metananlysis in the post on awl for March 11, 2020). The pronunciation with z became the norm only after i in addice was lost ( syncopated, to use a technical term) hence the modern spelling. We do not know why s in adesa and its likes remained voiceless in Old and Middle English, instead of becoming z. The consonant s in all those forms should have been voiced, but until the seventeenth century the standard spelling was addice, and Samuel Johnson, the author of the famous 1755 dictionary, considered the spelling and the pronunciation adze to be a reprehensible corruption of addice. As will be shown below, adusa may be the form that provides the best clue to the etymology of adz(e). Also, eadesa and adusa have come down to us. It had several local variants, and its gender fluctuated: adesa was masculine, while adese was feminine. The word adz(e) was coined long ago and surfaced more than once in Old English texts. I am picking up where I left off last week.
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