Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1991, Page 113

ETYMOLOGICAL NOTES
117
the credibility of the alternative etymologies
offered.
These are, in essence, contained in the
statements by Falk-Torp, Norw.-dán.etym.
Wb. (1911), 1085f., etc., who euate the Norse
word with OE smaere ’lip’on the basis of a
supposed semantic parallel between Lat.
labrum ’lip’ and the tree name laburnum.
This laboured analogy need hardly detain us.
Suffice it to comment that theLatin words
cannot be related, for laburnum, like its bed-
fellow the shrub-name viburnum, is in-
dubitablya loan word (Ernout-Meillet3,
Dict. etym. de la langue latine (1959), 335. It
seems that these authorities fancied that any
Germanic cognate of seamar would need
have the same consonat-vowel sequence. At
any rate, they regarded ’summer’ as related,
cf.Falk-Torp, 1225, who see Norw. symre
’anemone’ as one with OE symering-wyrt,
which they interpret as ’summer wort’. These
names are declared to stand in ablaut rela-
tionship to ’summer’, and further to seamar,
implying a basic meaning of ’summer flow-
er’.
We find that the above correspondences
show scant regard for the Realien. Ane-
mones and clover are quite separate species,
neither of them particularly merinting the
epithet ’summer’, no more than most other
flowers. The former is not much in evidence,
and hardly more than decorative, but the lat-
ter is a prominent, economically important
plant, attractive to livestock and invaluable
in the pastures. Two such dissimilar items
can never have gone under the same name.
As for the Old English term, its precise
meaning is unknwon. Even the literal in-
terpretation ’summer wort’ is open to doubt,
see Holthausen, Alteng. etym. Wb. (1934),
340. So all we are left with are words having
at best a comparable consonant skeleton,
but not a single verifiable fact to suggest that
any of them are related.
For good measure, Falk-Torp, 1085f., fur-
ther connect OE smaere ’lip’ with an adjec-
tive in the same language, galsmaere ’zum
lachen geneigt’, on the strength of which Jó-
hannesson, Isl. etym. Wb. /1956)m 909,
compares the plant name with -smaere as an
adjective, implying a literal meaning ’simi-
lar’. Whether this is a likely name for clover
we leave others to judge. But we hasten to
add that the Falk-Torp view of the relation-
ship of these two words is their own conjec-
ture, not shared by Holthausen, 301, and
surely for the best of reasons. Finally Pokor-
ny, Idg. etym. Wb. (1957), 968, returned to
the connection with ’lip’, characterising
clover as a ’Lippenblíitler’, evidently obli-
gious of the fact that not by any stretch of
the imagination could clover be seen as a
labiate.
We can safely assert that the words we are
concerned with have not been etymologised,
so that their true affinities remain unknwon,
and at this distance in time almost certainly
unknowable. But one ineluctable fact per-
sists. Scand. smcera and lr. seamar denote
one and the same plant, and a very signifi-
cant one. These words must be related. The
only question can be how they are related.
The shape of the words as we know them
precludes any suggestion of relatively recent,
i.e. medieval, borrowing one way or another.
In both languages the words will be tradi-
tional, as Bugge saw, their point of contact
being somewhere in Europe at the time when
Germanic and Celtic peoples lived as neigh-
bours.That the phonological differences not
do accord with the general rules is not sur-
prising since plant names, like bird names,