lambert@boring.UUCP (02/20/86)
>- other words have specifically scandinavian origins: "husband", "town", > "garden" ... According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, garden comes from Old Northern French gardin, a variant of jardin, which might come from a hypothetical Romanic form *gardino derived from a hypothetical (reconstructed) Common Germanic word *gardaz, *gardon, whence also Scandinavian gard, Dutch gaarde, German Garten and English yard. It is cognate to Russian gorod and -grad in Petrograd. Dutch gaarde is somewhat obsolete, surviving in poetry and in the words gaardenier (gardener), boomgaard (orchard < ort-geard) and wijngaard (vinyard). According to the same source, town comes from Common Germanic (except Gothic) *tunaz, *tunam, whence also Norse tun, Dutch tuin and German Zaun. A cognate Celtic dun- survives in some town names: Autun, Leyden. The original meaning was the same as garden: enclosed land. Note that Dutch tuin still has this meaning: the normal translation of garden is tuin. German Zaun now means the fence or hedge enclosing the garden. -- Lambert Meertens ...!{seismo,okstate,garfield,decvax,philabs}!lambert@mcvax.UUCP CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science), Amsterdam