#Adze image manual

æces seems to have developed from some such form. Last week, while looking for the etymology of the word ax, I mentioned, among many other words, Old Saxon akus. A Basque cognate or etymon of adz has also been proposed again, perhaps there is no need to go so far.Īn adze. Even if the two forms were related as items of the ancient Indo-European stock, the occurrence of a carpentry term only in Hittite and Old English would have been a minor miracle. This conclusion is intuitively correct, because, if adz were a migratory word (a common case with the names of tools and instruments of all kinds), it would have, almost certainly, turned up somewhere between Anatolia and Anglo-Saxon England. Here I’ll only say that, according to the opinion of the most reliable modern specialist, the Hittite word is not related to adz. Our readers interested in all kinds of details pertaining to the Hittite word will find them in the entry adz in my etymological dictionary. Its meaning has been a matter of debate, but the noun is now glossed as “ax.” This is indeed a remarkable coincidence. In Hittite, a dead language of ancient Anatolia, the word ateš occurred. One lookalike has attracted special attention. thixle ~ German Dechsel “adz” (pay special attention to this pair!), Latin astutus “sharp astute,” Latin ador “spelt” (a cereal plant) and asser “stake,” Lithuanian vedegà “adz icepick” (related to Sanskrit vádhar– “some deadly weapon”), and a few others.

#Adze image manual

The search was for the words denoting either something sharp or related to manual skills: German Ader “vein,” German ätsen ~ Engl. Look up cagey in a respectable reference book! “Origin unknown.” Does a cagey person live in a mental cage of his or her own construction and refuses to leave it? A trite piece of folk etymology? But an adz was a well-known tool, and it is reasonable to suggest that its name, a technical term, was coined by those who dealt with it.Īlthough adz seems to have been a neologism, quite a few of its possible cognates (or rather, look-alikes) have been offered: some by over-imaginative authors, others by reliable ones. Yet numerous well-known modern (!) adjectives, verbs, and nouns, summarily dismissed in dictionaries without explanation as slang, have no ascertained etymology. The process of formation must have been simple, even transparent, for people are not expected to create words out of nothing. The texts in which adesa appears owe nothing to the language of the Vikings, and indeed no similar word exists in Scandinavian.

If the speakers of Old English had brought it to their new home from the continent, some related forms would probably have turned up in Frisian, Dutch, or German. Most likely, it was coined “locally” and had no currency outside England. Via Wikimedia Commons.Īs mentioned at the end of the previous post ( March 18, 2020), adz has no established cognates, even though it is an old word. They are more or less predictable and shed no light on the origin of our word. A few other dialectal forms of adz are also known. The form atch turned up in the seventeenth century, and some people who said an adz occasionally made the by now familiar mistake of misdivision and turned an adz into a nadz (see the examples of such metananlysis in the post on awl for March 11, 2020).

The pronunciation with z became the norm only after i in addice was lost ( syncopated, to use a technical term) hence the modern spelling. We do not know why s in adesa and its likes remained voiceless in Old and Middle English, instead of becoming z. The consonant s in all those forms should have been voiced, but until the seventeenth century the standard spelling was addice, and Samuel Johnson, the author of the famous 1755 dictionary, considered the spelling and the pronunciation adze to be a reprehensible corruption of addice. As will be shown below, adusa may be the form that provides the best clue to the etymology of adz(e). Also, eadesa and adusa have come down to us. It had several local variants, and its gender fluctuated: adesa was masculine, while adese was feminine. The word adz(e) was coined long ago and surfaced more than once in Old English texts.

I am picking up where I left off last week.