Kilted Etymologies

[TheKiltedWonder]

Being part Swedish I was always interested in the Scandanavian origins for kilt. But I suspect it was more rooted in a woman's skirt than in a gentleman's kilt. A blue and yellow Swedish tartan would be nice.

Well, judging from the OED's entries the noun seems to have come from the verb mentioned in the original post. I suspect that "kilt" the noun always referrred to a male, Scottish garment in English since the earliest written attestation refers to a male garment. The verb its derived from could be used with male clothing, as seen in the quotation, but I suspect it could also be used to describe female clothing as well.

As for a Swedish tartan, I believe there is one. I thought about getting it myself.

[offtopic]
Did you all know that skirt and shirt come from the same root? Skirt was inherited from Old English. Shirt comes from Old Norse and as I said, was from the same root as "skirt". However in Swedish even today "ski" will make a "shi" sound, so in Old Norse "skirt" became pronounced "shirt" and the English borrowed a word into the language which it already had and they gave it a slightly different meaning.

[Galician]

Good guess, but nope! This change is due to umlaut (Any German students May be confused since the dots over ä, ö, ü are also called umlauts). To very much under-describe it, umlaut is vowel change. In German and English (and maybe other languages) it is used to mark some plurals: Man -> men. Mann -> Männer ( pronounced: Menn-er or Menn-uh); Mouse -> Mice. Maus -> Mäuse (pronounced: Moy-suh).

But brethren is the former plural of brother. It's rather archaic today though.

Good point, though--as any German knows, what WE call umlauts are an orthographic abbreviation for the letter "e." It's the same as the "accent circumflex" in French, which has replaced the letter "s" in a word. Wouldn't brethren be subject to both shifts?

[Woodsman]

How about the European Union Tartan? Looks Swedish to me.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/CChalmers/

[Bugbear]

Oh dear... I'm having "English Major" flashbacks from reading this thread. The hours and hours of walking the halls of ASU... what was the name of that building, "Normal building," I can't take the pressure man, I'm going to crack.

[Pleater]

Alas, my grandmother died when I was about six or seven, and recording devices were not around in most homes then - that would be 1957. She was, by the way, unable to read and write, her brothers coached her in writing her name so that when she married she did not have to put an X in the register. When my father went to school he would go home each day and tell her what he had done and so she did eventually learn her letters, but not well.

Apparently I have only to read aloud from the King James version of the bible to drop back a couple of centuries in speach. The church I went to was always careful to give me a modern version of the bible after the first time I read in a service.

I don't even notice I am doing it. I do notice archaic forms -such as that 'was always careful' - but only on looking back at written words.

When I get angry I use thee and thou and tha'h'll - as in 'tha'h'll come to regret that', which I supose is a dialect contraction of thou shalt. That is usually just before I really lose my temper - not a sight for the faint hearted. There is a good dose of Viking on that side of the family.

Another plural I use is housen - though most people hear it as 'housing' so it is not remarked on much.

Hosen is a multiple plural - that is more than one pair of hose.

I just thought of somewhere I use 'childer' - I am a folk singer in another life and it ocurs in a song I was looking for for about two decades.

I thought that a petticoat was simply what it sounds like, petite coat, small coat, as opposed to great coat, and its being a female garment only came about when the word, not the garment, no longer had a wider use.

There was a vowel change in English - the only one I can think of is the word meat, which was said 'miet' almost rhyming with 'quiet' before the sounds slid around to their modern forms. But that is really going back.

I remember arguing with a teacher that Chaucer's Wife of Bath was not gate toothed but goat toothed - that is had a gap between her two upper front teeth - like me, and my grandmother had always called that goat toothed. Or that is what it sounded like.

[fluter]

Apparently I have only to read aloud from the King James version of the bible to drop back a couple of centuries in speach.

Then we must record Pleater reading the KJV!

The Great Vowel Shift in English is fascinating. Wikipedia reference

Software geeks of a certain age (he said, dating himself) use VAXen as the plural form of the late Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX-11 computer systems. By analogy, sometimes the plural of box (generic computer system) is boxen; but this is more fanciful.

[Galician]

My very thought! Pleater, I do hope that you tape yourself in fit mode, though with all small objects tied down!

[Pleater]

I just read the Wikipedia article - that explains why when I watch the Canterbury tales - there is a series of them on TV for schools, it sounds really 'posh' - when I read it for myself it sounds really 'broad' - I am not certain which is right.

Would the speakers have sounded like me at the time, but when written down the tone was raised as it was for people who could read and who would have spoken in an upper class manner?

I doubt that anyone would want to be within axe throwing range of me when angry - and as for any recording device - unless it was rather small and hiden under something sturdy....

[JakobT]

So where did the noun come from? A verb "to kilt" meaning "to gird up, to tuck up round the body", as illustrated by Burns himself in 1792 "I'll kilt my coats aboon my knee, And follow my love thro' the water." This verb is classified as "apparently of Scandanavian origin" on account of Danish kilte meaning "to tuck up", ON kilting "skirt".

The Norwegian-Danish Etymological Dictionary lists the origin of the word as kjalta or kelta in Old Norse, which refers to tucking up an apron or a skirt in order to carry something in your lap. From this, the word also came to refer to the lap itself, and is related to the Gothic kilϷei, which means womb. This in turn is related to the Anglo-Saxon cild, the modern English version of which is child. So kilt and child have a common origin.

[Bugbear]

Well, if "kilt and child have a common origin," then I want everybody to know that I just put on the kilt, I didn't get anybody pregnant.