Re: Felice Vinci's "Homer in the Baltic" theory: linguistic deconstr

For those who might be interested, the Germanic "wild garlic" word somehow made it into Breton, where we find a rare _ramz_ 'ail sauvage'. I'm not sure of the exact route. I suppose it could come from Old or Middle English or later (there was until recently a lot of onion-related contact between Britanny and England), from Old Norse or maybe even from Franconian.

Anders

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> On 2009-06-07 07:34, Brian M. Scott wrote:
>
> > <Ramps>, <ramp>, and <ram> are variant developments of OE
> > <hramsa> 'onion, garlic'; in Great Britain they refer to
> > Allium ursinum (wild garlic, bear's garlic), in the U.S. to
> > Allium tricoccum (wild leek). The OED says that <ramps> is
> > regional on both sides of the Pond: northern, Scottish, and
> > Irish on the Right, east Midland and southeastern on the
> > Left. <Ramsons>, from the same source, seems to be a
> > current, non-dialect term for the Allium ursinum.
>
> During the recent Copenhagen conference I found, to my delight, that the
> Danes still ate ramsons (ramsløg) (it used to be important in Polish
> folk medicine -- I know that from my grandmother, now in her 90s).
> Handbook of the history of English should quote the word as an
> interesting surviving example of a weak-noun plural in OE -an reanalysed
> as a singular, which in turn makes <ramsons> a nice example of a
> historically double plural, like <kine> or <children>. Had it developed
> regularly, we would have something like sg. <rams>, pl. <ramsen> today.
> It's clear that some dialects have reanalysed <rams> as pl. <ram#s> and
> back-formed sg. <ram> (like <pea, peas> replacing <peas, peasen>), which
> makes it an interesting example of... etc.
>
> A very singular collection of plurals for one and the same plant.
>
> Piotr
>