Sails in the North—New Perspectives on an Old Problem

Abstract

The origin of sail has been debated for a long time, but the linguistic evidence has rarely been taken into account. The word sail has a cognate in two Celtic languages, and a good linguistic chronology is available for these. The reconstructed historical development of Celtic and Germanic words indicates that the word existed in West Germanic well before the Anglo-Saxon migrations and the confinement of Celtic to the British Isles. An origin of both word and technology in the Celtic world is proposed, both being passed into the Germanic world in the Rhine region.

Sails in the North: Further Linguistic Considerations

“…Nor is it stated that the period of principal influence of Latin on Welsh and subsequently Irish was during the Christianisation of these realms in the 5th and 6th centuries, post‐dating the Roman occupation of Britain (but not Ireland) and independently of the incursions of the Anglo‐Saxons from the continent. In a discussion of the quite narrow semantics of many of the above words, having, as they do, the exclusive meaning ‘sail’ as opposed to significations pointing to other applications of textiles, the author calls attention to ‘the use of Irish séol for “veil”, as opposed to the more common fíal “veil”, an earlier loan from Latin velum , which had a much wider range of textile‐related senses’ (Thier, 2003: 183). Here it would have been useful to explain that alternance between initial f‐ and s‐ in Old Irish is quite common as a result of lenition, and affected early loan words, as for example when Latin furnus ‘oven’ is found in Irish as sorn ‘furnace, oven, kiln’ and, in a rare technological transfer from the Celtic lands to the northern world, is found in Faroese and Norwegian as a term for a grain‐drying kiln (on Old Irish phonology, see Thurneysen, 1946: 571–72; for sorn in Irish, Dictionary of Old Irish , 1913–76, s.v.…”

“…Thier's position, after a lengthy review of possible etyma and paths of transmission of an original sail word, is to subscribe to Peter Schrijver's proposal for an original * siglo ‐ (Schrijver, 1995: 357), although ‘[he] does not specify whether this should be regarded as an Indo‐European form or as a common form borrowed from an unknown language at an early date, as it cannot really be determined’ (Thier, 2003: 186). Such an etymology, Thier contends, accounts for all known forms and the most plausible development is to see in siglo ‐ ‘an origin more recent than common Indo‐European’ (186f.…”