Re: CONLANG Digest - 9 May 2000

On 12 May, John Cowan wrote:

>John Mietus scripsit:
>
>> How did it become {island}, anyway?
>
>Contamination from "isle". Despite appearances, "island and "isle"
>are not closely related.   "Island" is native
>English, "isle" is from Latin "insula" via Old French.  Originally
>the English word was simply "i"; when that got confusing, the
>suffix "-land" was added for clarity, literally "island-land".
>Then an unhistorical "s" was added to make "iland" look more like
>"isle".
I'm still confused( :-)  ). Is "i" a maximal shorteneing
of the Old French, while "isle" was a less drastic version,
or did "i" derive from some other source, and if so, what?
(Modern German has "Insel" for island --- from the same
Old French source?)
    The reason I ask, is that the word for island in Hebrew
is also "i" (spelled aleph-yod). My (Hebrew) dictionary says that
ancient Egyptian (Hamitic, not Semitic) had "Iw" (or
something like "aleph-vav" and that ancient Phonecian
(Semitic)  also had something like "aleph-yod".
    That English also had "i" for island is probably a coincidence
 and not a borrowing from the Mediterranean world. (No?)
(BTW, what was the Proto-IE for "island"?)

Dan Sulani

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likehsna rtem zuv tikuhnuh auag inuvuz vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.