At 2:57:52 PM on Monday, April 7, 2008, Rick McCallister
wrote:
> pratt- "trick" sticks out as interesting; I'm thinking
> it has more to do with "clever", i.e. English pretty
> originally meant something like "clever, charming,
> etc."
The original sense seems to be something like 'clever in a
tricky, sly, possibly even deceitful fashion': OE has
<prætt> 'a trick, craft, art', <prættig> 'tricky, sly,
cunning, wily, astute', and ON has among others <prettr> 'a
trick, deceit, fraud', <pretta> 'to cheat, deceive',
<prettugr> 'tricky, deceitful'.
> Then there's Dutch pratt "to speak" and English prattle
> "babble" --are these somehow related?
I believe that it's <praten> 'to speak', MDu. <pra:ten>, MLG
<pro:ten, pra:ten>; English <prate> is probably a borrowing
from MDu. or MLG, though there might have been an unrecorded
OE cognate. <Prattle> is a derivative in <-le> of <prate>
('Thou pratelist Latyn faste' a1500) of a type common in ME.
The OED on the suffix:
A verbal formative, repr. ME. <-(e)len>, OE.
<-lian>: -- OTeut. type <-ilôjan>, with a frequentative or
sometimes a diminutive sense. Among the few examples that
go back to OE. are <nestle>, <twinkle>, <wrestle>. In ME.
and early mod.E. the suffix was extensively used (like the
equivalent forms in MHG. and mod.Ger. and in Du.) to form
vbs. expressing repeated action or movement, as in
brastle, crackle, crumple, dazzle, hobble, niggle, paddle,
sparkle, topple, wriggle, etc. Many of these formations
are from echoic roots, as babble, cackle, gabble, giggle,
guggle, mumble, etc.
Brian