SOME INTERNATIONAL NAUTICAL ETYMOLOGIES

References

• Robert , E. Lewis . 1952 . Middle English Dictionary Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press . (vol. L, 1143f., s.v. lödes-man. Much later, in the nineteenth century, lodesman would seem to have been displaced by leadsman, although the two functions are clearly distinct
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• Brook , G. L. and Leslie , R. F. Layamon: Brut London : Oxford University Press . 2 vols, Early English Text Society, 250 vv. 6245f.
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• Arnold , Ivor . 1940 . Le Roman de Brut 2 vols, Société des Anciens Textes Français (SATF, Paris, I.vv. 3310f.
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• 1949 . Studies in French language and literature…R. L. Graeme Ritchie Cambridge : Cambridge University Press . Paul Barbier, in ‘On the origin and history of three French words’, (repr. Books for Libraries Press, Freeport, NY, 1966), 9–23, offers the only full treatment of ‘Old French laman “pilot, sea-pilot, coastal- or harbour-pilot” ‘(12–22), but his proposed development and interrelation of the various forms in English, French and other languages is not convincing in its detail. The present note is concerned more with semantic than phonological evolution
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• Studer , Paul . 1910 . The Oak Book of Southampton, of C.A.D., 1300 , Rolls Series (Longman Paris : Imprimerie royale . 3 vols (Cox and Sharland, Southampton, II.76–9. The passages on customary maritime law in this work and those listed below all appear to go back to the Rôles d'Oléron, which may have twelfth-century origins and have been to a great extent prompted by the extensive wine trade between Bordeaux and England. See Karl Friederich Krieger, Ursprung und Wurzeln der Rôles d'Oléron (Böhlau, Köln, 1970); James Shephard, Les origines des Rôles d'Oléron, MA thesis (Université de Poitiers, Poitiers, 1983); Georges Peyronnet, ‘Un document capital dans l'histoire du droit maritime: les rôles d'Oléron, XII–XVII siècles’, Sources [Paris] 8 (1986), 3–10. Grands, petits lamans are distinguished: the former were sea-pilots, the latter guided shipping along the coast, into estuaries and ports. In a text complementary to the Rôles d'Oléron, Le coutumier d'Oléron, the island's collection of customary law, editor and translator James H. Williston identifies the grand laman as the capitain, although this is unsupported in the evidence (Société des antiquaires de l'Ouest, Poitiers, 1992), 168, 176. Other texts, none in a trustworthy modern edition, and their approximate dates are: Francis B. Bickley (ed.), The Little Red Book ofBristol (W.C. Hemmons, Bristol, 1900) [c. 1350]; J. Garonwy Edwards (ed.), Littere Wallie preserved in Liber A in the Public Record Office (University Press Board, Cardiff, 1940) [1283]; Travis Twiss (ed. and trans.), The Black Book of the Admiralty, 4 vols, Trübner, London, 1871–6) [c. 1450]. A similarly dated overview is found in the better-known work by J.-M. Pardessus, Collection de lois maritimes antérieures au XVIIIe si`cle, 6 vols (, 1826–45), I. 332f. Pardessus is particularly misleading as concerns the passage quoted here from The Oak Book, because he states that coastal pilots are taken aboard in order to pass the various named landmarks, whereas these rather mark the boundaries of the pilots' ‘jurisdictions’
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• Translation adapted from Studer.
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• Twiss . Black Book of the Admiralty II. 394
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• The Canterbury Tales, , 3rd ed. Boston : Houghton Mifflin . The ‘General Prologue’ of, in Larry D. Benson (gen. ed.), The Riverside Chaucer (, 1987), 30, vv. 401–4. The portrait mentions another span of coast reminiscent of the way of dividing pilots' areas of competence, ‘Fro Gootland to the cape of Fynystere’, the Baltic island of Gotland to Cape Finistere on the Iberian peninsula. We should not forget that Chaucer's work in customs, and his portrait of the Shipman, in particular as concerns barratry and piracy, may owe something to such collections of customary law as the Rôles d'Oléron and the Catalan Consulat de Mar; see William Sayers, ‘Chaucer's Shipman and the Law Marine’, The Chaucer Review (in press)
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• E. Latham , R. 1975 . Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources London : Oxford University Press . See (fasc. 5, 1635. Additional early instances (lodmannagium, lodesmannus, 1282) are also listed in this source
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• We may question whether the 400:40 ratio of lexical loans from Norse to Norman represents continuity or its opposite. But much of Gallo-Romance nautical vocabulary would have served well to describe construction of and activity on a Scandinavian-style ship, and it may well be that the surviving lexical loans represent and accompanied the transfer of a new nautical technology from Scandinavia to Francia.
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• Bosworth , J. and Toller , T. N. 1976 . An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Oxford : Oxford University Press . repr. (s.v. lādman; see, too, the Old English Corpus assembled for the Dictionary of Old English, which has a single instance, referenced Num. B8, 1.4.4 (http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/ofoed)
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• van Wartburg , Walter . 1928–68 . Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch Paris : CNRS . [FEW], 20 vols (Klopf, Bonn, since 1992 Zbinden, Basel), Germanische elemente, 16 (1959), 480, s.v. lootsman. The Nouveau glossaire nautique d'Augustin Jal. Revision de l'édition publiée en 1848 (, and Mouton, La Haye, 1970), fasc. L (1998), 1032f., has a valuable collection of examples of lamaneur, lamanage but accepts the lootsman derivation and so incorporates examples of its early attestation and supposed derivatives. It should also be noted that the first examples of loman cited in Frédéric Godefroy, Dictionnaire de l'ancienne langue française (Ministère de l'Instruction Publique, Paris, 1881–1902), are rather later than those cited here from English naval records
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• 1936 . La pratica della mercatura Francesco Balduccio Pegolotti, Allan Evans (ed.) (The Mediaeval Academy of America, Cambridge, Mass., 16 and 257
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• 1991–3 . Protheselaus London : Anglo-Norman Text Society . Hue de Rotelande, A. J. Holden (ed.), 3 vols, Anglo-Norman Text Society 47 (I. vv. 1409–24. The editor's notes to vv. 1411–2 and 1421 make a number of useful correctives to earlier commentary but, as my translation and the subsequent discussion of top indicate, the nautical scene has not been fully understood nor the Norse origin of top recognized
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• The American Neptune , 25 I interpret lof, in this twelfth-century reference, as a wooden pin through the sheerstrake to extend the weather edge of the sail, thus functioning like a bumpkin. Later it would come to mean the forward edge of the square sail itself, and then generally the windward quarter when a ship was tacking. A Germanic etymology has been generally been sought for luff. I contend that the origin of the term, perhaps like the operation of tacking itself, is to be sought in the Scandinavian north. See William Sayers, ‘A Norse Etymology for luff “weather edge of the sail”’, 61 (2002), -38
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• Leclanche , Jean-Luc . 1980 . Le conte de Floire et Blancheflor 1379 – 86 . Paris : Champion . Classiques Français du Moyen Age (Honoré vv
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• Pelan , Margaret . 1937 . Floire et Blancheflor Paris : Les Belles Lettres . (Société d'édition vv. 1195f. In connection with the variation between tores, tups, we may note that Sandahl suggests that ME top is a shortened form of topcastle. He cites Old French (better, Norman) top but offers only a non-specific Germanic origin. The end result is the impression that top never meant ‘mast top’ in Norman, but this is clearly wrong as top castles were not in use, for example, in Hue of Rotelande's time. Sandahl's sequence must be reversed, with an early top ‘mast top’ being given broader semantics to include the structures mounted around the mast top, the castles.In some instances there is doubt as to whether tref is being used in its narrow sense of ‘yard’ as derived from Lat trabs, trabis ‘beam’ or more generally as ‘yard with sail attached’, even ‘sail’ alone. In this last case it would show the influence of a Germanic, likely Frankish, term for ‘tent’ that originally referenced textile material and was then extended to the wool (and occasionally linen) of sails. In general, when the description or narrative is at its technically most detailed, the meaning ‘yard’ prevails, as in the present passage
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• Gaimar , Geoffroy . 1960 . L'estoire des Engleis Oxford : Blackwell . Alexander Bell (ed.), Anglo-Norman Text Society, 14–16 (B. vv. 6080f
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• R. Unger , C. 1871 . Mariusögur 2 vols (Bragger & Christie, Christiania, 786
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• Sturluson , Snorri . 1949 . Edda Snorra Sturlusonar: nafnapular og skáldatal 45 – 86 . Guðni Jónsson (ed.), (Íslendingasagaútgáfan, Reykjavik, 330–3, at 331. For a full discussion, see William Sayers, ‘The Ship heiti in Snorri's Skáldskaparmál’, Scripta Islandica, 49 (1998)
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• V. Smithen , G. 1952 . The Life of Alexander: Kyng Alisaunder London : Oxford University Press . Early English Text Society, 22 (1.1415
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• Mather , J. F. Jr. 1956 . PMLA , 12 ‘King Ponthus and the Fair Sidone’,(1897), 1–150, at 6, 1.19. It is of interest to note reflexes of Old Norse nautical terms being called up when continental romances, especially French, were translated in Scandinavia. As an example, a brief passage from a medieval Swedish translation, Flores och Blanzeflor: Tha til skipith komin var han, han badh sik kallæ then styre man; ‘Thu skal thet gøra iak bidher hæræ, Styr til the hampn that veet næst Vara!’ (When he reached the ship, he had the steersman summoned. ‘Do as I now command; steer for the harbour you know to be nearest!’) Emil Olson, Flores och Blanze/or (C. Bloms boktr., Lund, vv. 661–4. Here we find Swedish equivalents of the Norse terms that gave Norman French words we have earlier seen for skip, steersman, and harbour
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• 1989 . Ox/ord English Dictionary Oxford : Oxford University Press . 2nd edn, 20 vols
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• James , A. and Murray , H. 1872 . The complaynt of Scotland Early English Text Society, 18 (N. Trübner, London, 42
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• Falk , Hjalmar . Wörter und Sachen . Wörter und Sachen , 4 See 1–122, at 60
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• Sandahl , Bertil . 1951 . Middle English Sea Terms Cambridge , Mass. : Harvard University Press . 3 vols (Lundequistska Bokhandeln, Uppsala, and-82), III.102ff.
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• étui The normal meaning of in French is ‘sheath, case’ and the word has been traced via OFr. estuier ‘keep, conserve’ to Late Lat. *studiare and eventually to studium ‘application, zeal, care’. The term for the sail, bonnette en étui, is then quite unlikely to derive from this source and we must rather imagine the evolving Old French estuinc aligning itself with the better-known word, despite the semantic anomaly. Perhaps the sail's proportions might have permitted it to be conceived of as ‘sheath-shaped’
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• Lund , Niels . 1984 . Two voyagers at the court of King Alfred: the ventures of Ohthere and Wulfstan, together with the description of northern Europe from the Old English Orosius (Sessions, York, 20. Ohthere's tributaries paid him two ship's ropes (annually?), one of walrus and one of seal, each 60 ells long. If we take both the English and Scandinavian ell to be 18 inches, the ropes would have been a fairly impressive 90 feet long (unless sciprap is being used as a collective and several lengths of rope were allowed)
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• 1881 . La Vie de Saint Gile 876 – 906 . Guillaume de Berneville, Gaston Paris and A. Bos (eds), Société des Anciens Textes Français (Firmin Didot, Paris, vv
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• 1997 . Romanische Forschungen , : 383 Full treatment in William Sayers, ‘Norse Nautical Terminology in Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Verse’,109–426
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• Sandahl . III.123, s.v. uptie.
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• Útstag is still advanced in Jean Renaud, ‘L'héritage maritime norrois en Normandie’, in Catherine Bougy et al (eds) Mélanges René Lepelley: recueil d'études en hommage au Professeur René Lepelley (Musée de Normandie, Caen, 1995), 21–7, at 26. The article offers a useful, if somewhat uncritical, set of Norman terms from ON
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• 1958 . The Scandinavian Element in French and Norman: a study of the influence of the Scandinavian languages on French from the tenth century to the present New York : Bookman Associates . On differences between Old Danish and the better-known, standardized Old Norse- Icelandic, and on their implications for Norman French, see Ralph Paul de Gorog
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• 1896 . Naval accounts and inventories of the reign of Henry VII ‘Stone gonnes of yron in the Wast of the seid Shipp’, 1485–97 (Naval Records Society, London, 194, re-edited in Sandahl, I.207, and dated to 1485; ‘These goodly shyppes lay there at rode…The wastes decked with serpentynes stronge’, Here after followeth ye batayll of Egyngecourte…(Johan Skot, London, [1536?]), 90 Aij. See too Middle English Dictionary, s.v. wast(e).
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• 1895–1900 . Dictionnaire général de la langue française Adolphe Hatzfeld and Arsène Darmesteter (Ch. Delagrave, Paris
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• 1972 . Nouveau glossaire nautique fasc. B s.v. belle
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• OED, belly 9, II.789, col. b
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• Although the first European vessels were logboats fashioned from a single trunk, no antecedent at this historical depth (proto-Germanic?) is claimed here for bolr, bulr in the sense of ship's waist
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• Falk . ‘Altnordisches Seewesen’, 52. In the examples which follow, the basic corporeal meaning is followed by the figurative nautical use: bógr ‘shoulder; bow’, hals ‘neck; hawse’, hlýr ‘cheek’ (near the ear); bow’, kinn ‘cheek; bow’ (cf. Fr. joue ‘cheek; bow’), kinnungr ‘bow’, lœr ‘thigh, shank; stern’ (cf. Fr. hanche ‘haunch; quarter’ (of a ship)
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• 1982 . Guðmundr Arason A descriptive passage from the saga of the contentious thirteenth-century bishop (Prestsaga Guðmundar góða) part of the compilation known as Sturlunga saga, will illustrate how closely the cargo area and the ship's waist might be associated: On Saturday evening, as they were sitting at supper, a man called Asmund, a Norwegian, threw open a corner of the ship's tent and cried: ‘Hey! hey! Get the awnings off! Get up, men, and be quick about it! Breakers ahead! Shove aside the tables and never mind your supper!’ They all sprang up and threw off the awnings…. Just as they had raised the sail less than six feet from the cargo [af búlka], a heavy sea dashed against the cargo, fore and aft, and broke over it. There was someone clinging to every rope. Ingimund seized a sail-hook and tried to bring down the sail, while his nephew Gudmund had taken his place by the ship's boat [stored on top of the cargo], and he too tried to bring down the sail and gather it as he stood between it and the boat. But just at that moment there came another heavy sea, so great that it went over the whole ship. It swept away the vane of the mast and both the weather-boards [on the gunwales], and overboard went the sail and every piece of the cargo that was not fastened down, except the men. The ship was much damaged and so was the boat. They had got clear of the breakers when a third sea struck them, and this was not as heavy as the others. Now the men rushed to bail out the ship, both fore and aft, and the sail was hoisted. Then they saw land and began discussing where they were.Translation adapted from G. Turville-Petre and E. S. Olszewska (trans.), Guðmundar saga Arasonar: The Life of Gudmund the Good (Viking Society for Northern Research, London, 10f. Icelandic original in Guðni Jonsson (ed.), Guðmundar saga Arasonar (Íslendingasag- aútgáfan, Haukadalsútgáfan, Reykjavík, 1953), 189f.
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• 1983 . Nouveau glossaire nautique ‘1667 «Embelle est le lieu le plus bas et découvert du vaisseau au droit du maistre couple et du grant mast, et le lieu où est l'abaissement de la tonture», FOURNIER, Hydr.’, fasc. D-E 526, s.v. embelle.
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• As concerns prepositions and related adverbs, better evidence is available for ON pverr ‘athwart, transverse’ in nautical contexts, e.g. beita pvert ‘beat to windward or tack’, pverskeytingr ‘cross wind’, and, most relevant, pverskipa ‘athwart the ship’. But in this last instance, while movement transversal to the ship's axis is indicated, it is within the physical limits of the ship, from one side of the hull or deck to the other. In the notion of ‘abeam’, on the other hand, transversal movement is toward the ship which can be seen as its terminus. Furthermore, we have no example of pverr or the adverbial form pvers being used of a sea or wind that strikes the ship from the side
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• OED This consideration of wind and sea coming abeam raises the topic of broaching to, defined by the as ‘to veer suddenly so as to turn the side [of the ship] to windward, or to meet the sea’. The verb could also be used transitively with the sense of causing the ship so to turn. The earliest written attestations are from the first decade of the eighteenth century, which speaks against, but does not preclude, an origin in the complex interplay of Old and Middle English, Old Danish and Norman French of the Middle Ages. French brocher in the sense of ‘skewer’ has been proposed, but the image here would have to be that of the ship spitted on the direction of thrust of the wind and waves, which does not sit too well with the active, as opposed to passive, voice of the verb or the adverb ‘to’. While the question will not be pursued in the present context, I am attracted to the notion of a derivation from Old Norse brjóta, basically ‘to break’ (also used impersonally and with a reflexive form, brjótask), which occurs in a good number of nautical idioms, e.g. brjóta skip ‘to be shipwrecked’. But none of these is directly suggestive of broaching to and again we should have to have recourse to imagery, the true course of the ship ‘broken’ as it is turned sideways, to account for the expression
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