‘field traveler’ (so all the editions of Webster’s dic-tionary until W2, Skeat, CD, EW, and many others) or fallow < fealu + fare < faran, the meaning
be-Fag Fieldfare
Fag(g)ot
Fieldfare Fieldfare
ing ‘traverser over the fallow fields’ (for example, Wedgwood; R. Latham, and EB). According to OED, the word is an obscure formation and appar-ently means ‘field goer,’ but the middle syllable is not accounted for, “and this, with the divergent spelling in the OE. gloss, suggests possibility of corruption from popular etymology.” Older scholars tended to identify OE felofor and ME feldefare (Ettmüller [1851], 336; Stratmann1-3; Sweet [1897, felofor]; Brandl-Zippel, feldfare).
One often runs into the statement that OE feldefare is a reinterpretation of felofor (Mueller;
Mätzner, both cautiously; Smythe Palmer [1883];
Sweet [1888:309/715]), but this view found no support in later research (anonymous [1897:610]
and OED). Pogatscher (1903:181) noted that in Old English glosses L scorellus ‘fieldfare’ had often been translated clodhamer (hamer = amer: cf G Ammer
‘bunting’ and the pair G Goldammer ~ E yellowham-mer, in which -hammer is the result of a folk ety-mology most appropriate for describing a wood-pecker). He reconstructed the string *feltt u-amiro¤¤n > *feldemre (syncope, umlaut) > *feldeb¤¤re,
*feldefre (dissimilation of mr to br) > *feldefare (folk etymology). However, the history of OE clodhamer and ModE yellow hammer makes the de-velopment from -amiro¤n to -efre unlikely.
Some dictionaries say that fieldfare is a word of uncertain origin. For example, in Weekley’s opin-ion (1921), the origin of fieldfare is doubtful, for felo-for “may have changed its meaning, as bird names are often very vague.” The stumbling block seems to be the relationship between felde- and felo-, but UED also calls into question the derivation of -fare from the verb fare ‘go.’ MED, which took the non-existent Old English spelling feldeware at face value, interpreted the word as ‘field-dweller.’
Likewise W2-3 and Longman; RHD1 says that the change from feldeware to feldefare is due to w > f “by alliterative assimilation.” W3 no longer mentions that etymology, but RHD2 does. Pogatscher (1900:222) suggested the alternation of OE f with w but did not find a single convincing example.
Wedgwood, who traced felde- to feolu-, left -fare without comment. Lockwood (1981a:193; 1984;
1995b:373-4) reconstructed Old English *fealu-fearh ‘grey piglet’ (= ‘fallow farrow’), on the anal-ogy of Wel socen lwyd ‘fieldfare’ and WFr fjildbok
‘field billy-goat’ (‘fieldfare’); socen, allegedly an onomatopoeic word representing the bird’s cry, can also mean ‘pig.’ Swainson, Swann, and Whit-man add nothing new.
3. Despite the conflicting evidence, two points can be made with some certainty: 1) Although OE
felofor and ME feldefare designate different birds, the two names interacted over the centuries: field-fare goes back to feldfield-fare, whereas felfar and its vari-ants continue felofor. At some time, the true mean-ing of felofor must have been forgotten, and the word began to be used as the name of a ‘wrong’
bird. 2) The rule of West Germanic syncope makes the retention of medial e inexplicable. A. Campbell (1959:sec 367, note 3) called OE mihtele¤as ‘weak, powerless’ and *feldefare genitival compounds, but Lockwood observes that no other Old English compound beginning with feld- has -e-: even the word *feldware ‘dwellers in open country’ deduced from place names lacks it. OE felofor could not have influenced *feldefare, for then the form would presumably have been *feldofare or *feldufare.
The only solution seems to be positing OE
*feldgefore, a variant of *feldgefare (see more on the alternation of OE fore ~ fare at HEIFER), which would be a product of folk etymology, for ‘field traveler’ and especially ‘field companion’ is a vapid phrase. Lockwood (1981a:192) notes that the concepts ‘goer’ and ‘dweller’ are alien to the popu-lar ornithological nomenclature. The failure of the attempts to etymologize OHG wargengil ‘butcher bird’ as warg-gengil, from warg ‘wolf’ and geng-il
‘goer’ bears out the truth of that remark (Schlutter [1923:206]). The parallels that W. Grimm (1848:333) cites are unconvincing; see also Kralik (1914:131).
4. Two bird names are relevant for discover-ing the origin of fieldfare. The first of them is OE scealfor (or scealfra) ‘diver, cormorant’; see Kitson (1997:497-98) on its attestation. Kluge (1901a:199) derived scealfor from its synonym scræf (with cog-nates in West Germanic and Old Icelandic). Like many others, he cited a wrong form (it should have been scræb) and did not explain how scealfor got its second syllable. *Scræf, with metathesis, suppos-edly yielded *scearf; *scearf may have become scealf, but where is -or from? Old English breaking rarely affected æ before metathesized r, except in the An-glian dialects. Scealfor seems to be a doublet of scræb, with the root vowel broken before -lf.
The second syllable of scealfor could not have meant ‘traveler,’ but Du schollevaar, with its variant scholver (the name of the same bird; MDu scolfern, scolfaren, scolfaert, MLG scholver, schulver, Fr skolfer;
Suolahti [1909:395]), shows that -for is an integral part of scealfor. According to J. de Vries (NEW), schollevaar falls into scholl(e)v- and -aar, the latter on the analogy of aer ‘eagle’ (cf Du dompelaar ‘cormo-rant’ = dompel-aar from dompelen ‘dive’; see that verb in KM at Tümpel ‘pond’). More likely,
scholle-Fieldfare Fieldfare
Fieldfare Fieldfare
vaar is scholl-(e)-vaar and MLG scalvaron did not arise through dissimilation from *scarvaron.
A second bird name important for under-standing the origin of fieldfare is Du ooievaar
‘stork,’ which has numerous variants (Kosegarten, 101-02; Franck, VV, NEW, Gröger [1911:411], W. de Vries [1919:268-69], Blok-Stege [1995:29]). The Dutch word was so well known that one of its forms may even have made its way into Russian (Russ aist is a borrowing from Du or Low German;
see Grot [1899]). The relations between Du ooievaar and G Adebar ‘stork’ have not been fully clarified.
The first component of ModFr (1802) earrebarre (WFT) exhibits rhotacized d. The place name Ar-bere is, most probably, unrelated to earrebare (Naarding [1960]). J. Grimm (1844:638; the same in later editions; not yet in the 1835 edition) explained OHG odebero as ‘luck bringer’ (from OHG ôt
‘wealth, luck’ and -bero ‘carrier’). The widespread attitude toward the stork as a sacred bird and the custom of telling children that babies are brought by storks (see the ditties in Kosegarten and in Lin-nig [1895:445]) supported Grimm’s etymology. At the same time, J. Grimm (1966:147; first presented in 1845) reconstructed Gmc *uddjabaira or
*addjubaira ‘egg carrier.’ (See a comment on this etymology in Lagarde [1877:94, end of No 1358].) Wackernagel (1874a:189, note 4; first published in 1860) compared ade- and L uterus ‘womb.’
Grimm’s etymology of Adebar ~ ooievaar domi-nated German and Dutch dictionaries for ninety years (the same in SEO, stork, Persson [1912:26], and Van Langenhove [1928:160-61]), though Suo-lahti (1909:369-71) showed that forms like Du reg heilöver and G Heilebart, all meaning ‘luck bringer,’
arose by folk etymology (see also Andresen [1889:119]). Gröger (1911:secs 70-71) pointed out that Old High German compound adjectives nor-mally lost the connecting element when it followed a long-vocalic stem. If OHG odebero had had long o in the first syllable, medial -e- would have been syncopated. Holthausen (1924:116) came to a simi-lar conclusion: in his opinion, LG åderbår testifies to o°- in this word. Od- with a short vowel cannot be understood as ‘luck.’
Kluge tried to make Grimm’s idea more palat-able, but with little success. Adebar appears in EWDS4 with the gloss ‘Kindbringer,’ that is, ‘child bringer.’ In EWDS5-6, he took ade- (< ode-) to be a cognate of OI jó ‘child,’ itself an obscure word;
Persson (1912:26/3) tentatively followed that in-terpretation. EWDS7-10 guardedly equated -bero with -bero in OHG hornbero ‘hornet’ and in proper names. In these editions, he also divided odebero
into od and obero and traced obero to OHG obassa
‘roof’ (‘luck bringer on the roof’).
Numerous old conjectures, now forgotten, ex-ist about the origin of adebar. Wachter (Edebar) al-ready knew two “fanciful, almost ludicrous”
(miras & tantam non ridiculas) derivations: adebar
= oudvater ‘old father’ or edel-bar ‘noble bird.’ He explained Edebar (the form he preferred to adebar) as edefar ‘traveling bird,’ from ede ‘bird’ and G fa(h)ren, but did not specify the language in which he found ede. Apparently, he meant Wel edn ‘bird.’
The same etymology, with a reference to its origi-nator, appears in Wiarda. Wachter’s “ludicrous”
list can be enlarged: ‘bird traveling in flocks,’ from L avis ‘bird’ (Terwen [1844]); ‘bright-colored bird,’
from OE a¤d ‘fire’ and MHG var ‘color’ or their cog-nates (Schwenck1-2); ‘lamb-bringer,’ from Du oor
‘ewe’ (Schwenck4; before Schwenck, Ten Kate compared ooievaar and L ovis ‘sheep’), and finally,
‘a bird believed to carry food in its entrails,’ from G Ader ‘vein’ (Wasserzieher [1923:4-6]). (Wilken [1872:446] also noticed the similarity between Ade-bar and Ader—the stork allegedly had ‘exposed veins’—but called it “too trivial.”) The latest fan-tasy is Zollinger’s (G Adebar and Atem ‘breath’ re-lated to OI jó; 1952:61, 81; 86, note 73). OI jó, as we have seen, first turned up in connection with adebar in EWDS.5-6
Krogmann (1938a) disposed of the ‘luck bringer’ idea. He compared G Adebar with E field-fare and identified ade- as a cognate of OE waum(a)
‘stream, lake’ and G -bar as ‘traveler’ with b < f by Verner’s Law. He offered a detailed analysis of the Germanic root for ‘wet,’ to which the Old English word is related (1936:35-38). However, Krogmann conceded that -bar had later been understood as
‘carrier’ and that Adebar might have been reinter-preted as ‘luck bringer.’ The post-1936 dictionaries follow Krogmann, and those who felt dissatisfied with his etymology, for instance, Karg-Gästerstadt (1941:211), Neuss (1973:131), Seebold (KS), and Hiersche, offered no counterarguments.
5. Thus, we have E fieldfare, OE scealfor (with cognates), and Du ooievaar (with cognates). OE felofor, mentioned above, also needs attention. Suo-lahti (1909:300-01) examined the variants porfilio, polfir, folfir, philfor, and phelphur and concluded that felofor was “a corruption” of L porphyrio under the influence of scealfor. AeEW derives scealfor directly from porphyrio.
A bird name ending in -for must have sounded natural to speakers of Old English. The history of that element is almost impenetrable. It first proba-bly meant ‘belonging or pertaining to,’ and only by
Fieldfare Fieldfare
Fieldfare Fieldfare
inference ‘dweller’ (a concept alien to the popular ornithological nomenclature, as pointed out above), but the original meaning seems to have been forgotten long before the emergence of Old English texts.
Perhaps the same suffix can be detected in OE inneforan ~ innefaran ‘intestines, entrails.’ If we as-sume that -foran is a variant of -for(e), it can have its usual meaning in innefora, that is, ‘in front of, in the presence of, before.’ Gk †ntera ‘bowels’ consists of en- ‘in’ and -ter (a comparative suffix), the whole amounting to something like ‘farther inside’ (see WP I:217; IEW, 344, in both at e¤ter, and Brugmann [1897-1916:II/1, 324-26]). In Germanic, the desig-nation of viscera had the prefix in followed by all kinds of unpredictable elements, as OE inno and innelfe (innifli, innylfe), both with cognates in other Germanic languages; OI ístr ~ ístra ‘fat of the paunch’ (which AEW entatively derives from <*in-stra, as in MDu inster; ÁBM suggests the etymon
<*en(t)s-tra; see also ir ‘intestines’), and many others (Arnoldson [1915:150-59, especially 150-51], Baskett [1920:99-101, especially E1-2], Heinertz [1927:71-76], and AEW, innyfli). Innyfli consists of inn- and a suffix (the same suffix occurs in OI dauyfli ‘corpse’: A. Sturtevant 1928:470-71). OE innefora has a similar structure and presumably means ‘being inside.’ See E. Sturtevant (1928:5) on the reverse process—the names of parts of the body becoming prepositions. AeEW (-fora, -fara) calls innefora a word of unknown origin. Later, Holthausen (1952:279, note 10) compared -fora and Gk peàrata ‘limit, boundary, rope, end of the rope,’
with reference to L visce¤ra ‘intestines’ (< PIE *weis-
‘twist’) and ModG Geschlinge (the same meaning;
schlingen ‘tie, wrap, plait’). But innefora belongs with the other in(n)- words: intestines, entrails, and so on. It is a counterpart of regional (or colloquial) innards ‘viscera’ (< inwards), known since the 13th century, and attempts to separate -fora in innefora from the adverb fore carry little conviction.
The existence of the suffix -fore finds addi-tional confirmation in the history of HEIFER and especially of elver ‘young eel’ (1640), a variant of eelfare ‘passage of young eels up a river’ and ‘brood of young eels.’ In the earliest citation in OED (1533), eelfare means ‘brood,’ whereas the meaning
‘passage of young eels’ emerges only in 1836. The poor attestation of the word in texts (no data be-tween 1533 and 1836) makes it advisable to recon-struct the history of elver on philological grounds rather than basing it on the chronology of the re-corded examples.
Apparently, the change from e¤l- to e°l- occurred
contemporaneously with the shortening of the stressed vowel in words like OE æ¤rende (> ME e°rende) ‘errand’ and OE æ¤merge (> ME e°mere ‘em-ber’), that is, in the 13th century at the latest (Luick [1964:secs 353 and 387]). The voicing of -f- in elver must be old, as ModE wolves and culver from OE wulfas and culfer show. OE *æ¤lfore ~ æ¤lfare could not have had the sense ‘young eel.’ If, however, the suffix -fore ~ -fare designated inhabitants of re-stricted areas, it may occasionally have been used for designating areas and habitats as well. Perhaps
*æ¤lfore meant ‘territory favored by eels’ (for spawn-ing?) and, by implication, ‘place favored by young eels,’ whence ‘brood of young eels.’ The sense
‘young eel’ must have developed from the initial collective meaning of that noun. OE heahfore re-tained voiceless f when it became ME heifer, whereas *æ¤lfore or *æ¤lfare evidently split into *e¤lver and *e¤lfare. The latter, naturally, acquired the meaning ‘passage of eels,’ but it would not have yielded ‘passage of young eels’ if the connotation of the fish’s age had not been present in the ancient form. When *e¤lfare went out of use, elver (<*e¤lver) retained the senses of both words.
6. This, then, is the picture in its entirety. Old English had a bird name *feldfore ‘turdus pilaris,’
which acquired a synonym *feldgefore. Both meant approximately *’field bird.’ Another bird, probably also a thrush, was called felofor ‘brown one.’ Although Old English scribes knew that L porphyrio designated some exotic waterfowl, with time the Latin word changed beyond recog-nition and merged with felofor. All three words continue into the present: fieldfare (< *feldfore), feldefore and its variants (< *feldgefore), and felfar and its variants (< felofor). The modern forms with feld- (instead of field-, but not those with fel-) either never had lengthening before three conso-nants or underwent shortening in Middle English (HL, 705). Since by 1100, if not much earlier, the old meaning of the element -fore had been partly forgotten, compounds with it fell prey to folk ety-mology.
The same happened to the name of the stork in Dutch and German. Du ooievaar and G Adebar (*’swamp bird’) share the second element with E fieldfare. Since in the beginning vaar ~ -bar ~ -fare ~ -fore had as little to do with traveling or traversing as with carrying, Krogmann’s gloss of Adebar
‘swamp goer’ should be modified as ‘swamp-er,’
assuming that ade- is related to OE waum(a). OE scealfor and Du scholver ~ schollevaar have the same suffix. Whether scealfor goes back to scræb or has a verbal root (see Suolahti [1909:393-97] and AeEW),
Fieldfare Fieldfare
Fieldfare Filch
-for in it was interpreted or even introduced as a suffix of a bird name.
7. I. Taylor (1873:119) mentions a mountain in Devon called Fieldfare. He explains it as a Scandi-navian name (Field < fjeld), but in Dan fjeld ‘moun-tain’ the letter d never designated any sound (cf N fjell, Sw fjäll, OI fjall, fell). Fieldfare does not turn up in books on Devon toponymy (Liberman [1997:120-30]).
FILCH (1300? 1561?)
Filch ‘steal’ was, most likely, borrowed from thieves’
cant. It is an adaptation of G filzen ‘comb through’ (E filch, sb, means ‘hook’). Filch ‘beat; attack’ is a different word, possibly from OE gefylcian ‘marshal troops, etc.’
The date of the first occurrence of filch is un-clear. OED doubts the connection between filchid (1300) and the modern verb (see filch and bagle). Both examples of filch (sb) in MED (ca 1300) and of filch (v; 14th century) presuppose the meaning ‘attack,’ not ‘steal,’ and are about dogs.
The noun ffylche ‘attack’ was recorded in a poem of the first quarter of the 15th century. In 1561 filch
‘steal’ appeared and a year later filchman ‘staff with a hook at one end used to steal articles from hedges, open windows, etc.’ (Thieves using filchmans were popularly called anglers; -man, more often -mans, was a common suffix in thieves’
language: H. Webster [1943:232].) The other rele-vant forms are filching, a verbal noun (1567); ing, a present participle (1570); filcher (1573); filch-ingly (1583); and filch = filchman (1622). See further examples in Partridge (1949a). OED marks filch
‘hook’ as obsolete, but Hotten3 cites it as current.
The meaning ‘beat’ (?< ‘attack’) was also preserved in later times (OED: filch v3). OED transcribed filch with [ê] and [ß]. EDD has several words spelled filsch, possibly connected with filch ‘rag’ (for the [ß]
~ [ê] variation after resonants see Storm [1881:115, 126] and Luick [1964:1088, sec 788/2b]).
Numerous words appear in dictionaries as possible cognates of the verb filch: Gk fhl’j ‘de-ceitful’ (Minsheu, Junius, Talbot), L fallax ‘deceit-ful’ (Minsheu), F filou ‘thief, swindler’ and filouter
‘steal’ (N. Bailey, Thomson, Mueller, Blackley [1869:202-03]), F félon ‘traitor’ (Holmboe, veila), Old Portuguese filhar ‘seize,’ perhaps allied to Ital pigliare ‘seize’ or F piler ‘crush’ (Marsh [1865:188]), OI fela ‘hide’ (Thomson, who calls Old Icelandic Gothic; he also has “Gothic” filgia and Sw(?) filska;
cf Graham [1843:25]), OI véla ‘defraud’ (Holmboe), Go filhan ‘steal’ (Thomson’s fela implies filhan and its cognates, including E reg feal ‘hide’), G filzig
‘greedy’ (Skinner, Gazophylacium), Du fielt ‘rascal’
(Minsheu, who knew that the etymon of fielt is L vı@lis ‘base, mean’; he also cited Du biel, the same meaning), Gael fealleaidh ‘knavish’ (Mackay [1877]), SwiG flöke ‘steal’ (Wedgwood), Gael peallaid or peal-laij ‘skin of an animal, pelt’ (Mackay [1877], Stor-month).
Filch can be akin to a word for ‘pelt’ only if it once meant ‘rob an animal of its skin.’ Analogous cases would be Go wilwa ‘plunder’ (if it is related to L vellus ‘shorn wool,’ and E fleece sb and v) and OE hættian ‘scalp as punishment’ from the root of hæteru (< *hætteru) ‘clothes.’ Some of the compari-sons, cited in the paragraph above, are ingenious.
Blackley wrote a singularly uninformed book, but in addition to F filouter he offered a curious anal-ogy: L filum (the etymon of F fil ‘thread’) is to filch as G Strick ‘rope’ to G Strang ‘rope, cord’ and
‘rogue, scamp’ (that is, ‘gallowbird’). But thread was never used for hanging “rogues” and filch is not a noun. Apparently, the sound complex f-l can designate some miscreant, vice, or misdeed in a dozen languages. The (mainly regional) words cited in Wood (1913:19/159 and 64/48) also have the structure f–l but mean ‘jerk; ruin by improper handling; fumble; flap, etc’ and like various verbs from other languages for ‘swing, shake’ hardly have anything to do with filch. None of them ex-cept fillip (see it in the entry FUCK) has i in the root.
The Classical Greek and Latin forms are irrele-vant, for, like filch, they begin with [f], but filch is not a bookish borrowing, and if the words cited above were cognates, the non-Germanic form would have had initial p-. The same holds for the Latin and Old Icelandic forms with v-. The origin of F filou (? < E fellow) is obscure. The word seems to be too late to have served as the etymon of filch (also -ch would remain unexplained) and is rather reminiscent of E file ‘pickpocket,’ with which W (1828) and Weekley compared it. Filch has a rhym-ing synonym pilch; Mueller2 suggested that filch is its side form.
Skeat1 considered filch to be related to Go