At 9:39:45 AM on Wednesday, July 20, 2005, tgpedersen wrote:
> I came across English 'frolic', German 'frohlocken'. They
> are obviously related, but the dictionaries I've consulted
> don't seem to think so. English ones derive it from the
> Dutch adj. 'vrolijk', which makes no sense; the first
> attestations in English is as a verb, then as a noun.
The first English attestation is as an *adjective*. OED2
has this:
1538 BALE Thre Lawes 1794 And make frowlyke chere, with
hey how fryska jolye!
Thus, derivation from Dutch <vrolijk> (in Kilian <vrolick>)
makes perfectly good sense. The verb, according to the OED,
is derived from the adjective, and the noun from one or the
other. In connection with the verb it notes Flemish
<frolicken> (in Kilian) and German <frohlocken>, commenting
that the second element of the latter 'is of obscure
origin'.
> German ones analyse it as 'froh' + 'löcken' "jump"
> (related to English 'lick' "beat, defeat" ?)
OED2 takes this sense of <lick> to belong to the same word
as 'to lap with the tongue'. There is also <to lick up (an
enemy's forces> 'to destroy, annihilate', found in
Coverdale's 1535 translation of Numbers xxii, 4, with
further citations from 1548 and 1557, and <to lick of the
whip> 'to have a taste of punishment, found ca.1460 in the
form <Ye shal lik on the whyp>. Both are natural enough
extensions of the basic meaning, and from there to <lick>
'beat, defeat' isn't a great step.
Brian