Re: woad

W dniu 2012-03-14 01:25, dgkilday57 pisze:

> See message #68217, which corrects my earlier posts. I regard the
> /z/r/-less forms 'meed', 'woad', 'kien' as borrowed from NWB
> *me:do:-, *waida-, *kaina- in which the */z/ between a vowel and a
> voiced consonant was vocalized. OE <weard>, <werd> reflect inherited
> Gmc. *wazDa- 'woad', and Go. <ouisdil> (etc.) reflects Gmc. *wizDila-
> with /e/-grade, from PIE *wezdH-. In my opinion the Greek and Latin
> words are unrelated to this.

Just out of curiosity: what is the OE documentary evidence for <we(a)rd>
'woad'? I am only aware of a single glossary entry in
Corpus/Epinal/Erfurt which reads <sandix: uueard>. As "sandix" seems to
refer primarily to some kind of dye-yielding seaweed (rather than the
woad as a plant), it is not certain that <uueard> is really a variant of
<wa:d>; it could be a syncopated byform of <waroð> 'seaweed', for
example. And of course Gothic *wizdil- is only an insecure
reconstruction based on late mediaeval copies of Oribasius, and so not
much of evidence.

Piotr