Todays quotidian verbiage: Tor Heres another attempt to get Latin and Greek out of my system. Tor is actually a Celtic words (it has cognates in Welsh, at least), meaning a rocky hilltop or peak. Around here, bald is used in a similar way. (The difference being, balds often have grass, whereas tors are usually completely barren.) Celtic words, by and large, did not make it into English in very great numbers. The original Celtic- and Latin-speaking Britons were pretty thoroughly driven out of England during the original migration period. When the English later began to deal with the surviving Celtic peoples (Cornish, Welsh, Scots, Manx, and Irish), they usually did so from a position of strength, and the victor rarely apes the loser (unless the victor is Roman). What Celtic words did migrate over to English are often geographic terms, surviving in part because some place names made it in, especially in areas where the original Saxon migration was scarcer on the ground - the north and west of England. Tor originates in those border regions (which isnt surprising anyway, since the rest of England is rather flat).
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 04:33:00 +0000
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