Licencias de Conducir

is opaque and has no cognates except in Frisian.

The isolated nature of cæ¤^{g ~ ke}¤i has been recog-nized for a long time (Jellinghaus [1898a:464], E.

Schwartz [1951:210]). Nor does key resemble its counterparts in the other Germanic languages, such as Du sleutel, G Schlüssel, and (O)I lykill, all of which are etymologically transparent (Kluge [1926:sec 90]). Words designating keys, latches, and bolts may be borrowed. Such are, for example, E pin (Förster [1902:324-27]), OE clu¤stor (< L clu¤strum; SN II:324), E latch, bar, and bolt, and see other examples in Buck (1949:7.24), to which Russ shchekolda ‘latch, bar, bolt’–stress on the second syllable–apparently, from LG Steckholt (Vasmer IV:500) can be added. They may have unexpected origins. Consider E reg haggaday ‘latch,’ an obscure word (Skeat [1895]), G Riegel (equally obscure), and G Dietrich ‘skeleton key’ (from a proper name, like E jenny). But cæ¤g < *kaigjo¤-, if we disregard the Basque connection, seems to be a native word, and at one time it must have been coined from an easily identifiable root.

In most cases, words for ‘key,’ unless they mean ‘lock-er’ ~ ‘clos-er’ ~ ‘shut-ter,’ are derived from words for ‘peg,’ ‘nail,’ ‘pin,’ and ‘hook.’ The most primitive keys, when they were keys rather than bars, had bits. In many languages, the root of the word for ‘key’ means ‘curvature.’ See WP I:492-94, qle¤u, and IEW, 604-05, kle¤u-; WH (cla¤^va, claudo) also give the comparative material. A typi-cal example is Russ kliuch ‘key,’ related to kliuka (stress on the second syllable) ‘hooked staff, crook.’

SN II:327 reproduce several pictures of old keys.

The earliest extant locks used by speakers of the Germanic languages show the influence of Roman locksmiths (Falk [1918-19]), but the native Ger-manic words for ‘key’ go back to an older period (Heyne [1899:31]). Wattle doors of the type desig-nated by Go haurds (its English cognate is hurdle) had openings in the front wall, not real doors; they did not need elaborate locks. Go -lu¤kan ‘lock up’

and its congeners originally meant ‘bend, turn’

(Feist^3-4). Since G schließen, Du sluiten ‘lock up, close,’ and so on are related to L cla¤vis, they, too, must have meant ‘put a bolt across the door.’

At all times, some keys have been made to lock the door, others only to unlock it (so that we should distinguish between ‘closers’ and ‘open-ers’), and still others to perform both functions.

Keys and locks of medieval Scandinavia have been especially well researched. If the answer to Old English Riddle 44 from the Exeter Book is ‘penis’

and ‘key,’ the key it describes has a modern form.

Most of the oldest Norwegian, Danish, and Swed-ish devices for fastening the door do not antedate the epoch of the Vikings, but the shape of some of them is archaic (Berg at al [1966:48-61], Norberg [1967]). The long discussion on words for ‘key’ in Scandinavia has a bearing on both the linguistic and the material aspects of keys everywhere in the Germanic Middle Ages. See Brøndum-Nielsen (1931-32, 1933-34, 1971-73) and R. Pipping (1933-34); Brøndum-Nielsen (1931-32) contains numerous illustrations. Nor are relations between OI lykill and *nykill irrelavant for understanding how keys got their names elsewhere. See Jirlow (1936), Andersson (1936), Hamp (1971-73) and Holm (1993:109-10). If *nykill is not a phonetic variant of lykill (Byskov [1909]; DEO^3-4, nøgle; this point of view is much better argued than Andersson and Hamp’s), then *nykill should be understood as a bent stick. It will be suggested below that cæ¤^{g, too,} was ‘a curved pin,’ as Holthausen proposed.

E key is both a noun and an adjective. Pre-served now only in northern dialects and as fol-lows from the occasional spellings kay and keigh, pronounced [kei], key (adj) goes back to Middle English. OED (kay, key) gives two citations, one dated 13??, the other 1611, but the material in EDD (key) is abundant, even though by Wright’s time the adjective key was obsolescent in some areas (Audrey [1883-84]). Key (adj) has been traced to Scandinavian. OED refers to Sw reg kaja ‘left hand’

and kajhandt ‘left-handed.’ EDD cites Sw reg kaja (from Rietz) and also northern Frisian kei ‘awk-ward; inarticulate, lacking fluency.’ In English dia-lects, the most widely-known meaning of key is

Key Key

‘twisted,’ as in key-legged ‘knock-kneed, crooked’

and key-leg ‘crooked or bandy leg.’ The verb key means ‘twist, bend,’ used especially with reference to the legs twisted by illness, and so forth.

‘Left’ must have originated as ‘twisted’ and

‘bent,’ like OI vinstri ‘left’ (< *wenistru), with *wen- most plausibly glossed by Huisman (1953:105) as

‘bent downward’ (see also AEW, vinstri). Despite Frisk’s doubt (GrEW), Gk lai’j, L laevus, Proto-Slavic *le°vu°, and their cognates, including E left, originally seem to have meant ‘bent down, twisted.’ See etymological dictionaries and Beekes (1994:89). Malkiel (1979:esp 517 and 520) discusses words for ‘left’ and ‘right’ against a broad back-ground and refers to a few important earlier works. OI skeifr ‘oblique’ and G schief ‘crooked, lopsided, tilted’ (from Low German) versus L scaevus ‘left’ provide a parallel to the Scandinavian word, which served as the source of E key ‘left.’

Without s- we have not only Sw reg kaja ‘left hand’ but also (with root final v) Nynorsk keiv(en)

‘clumsy, awkward; false, unfortunate,’ keivhendt

‘handed’ and keiva ‘the left hand of a left-handed person’; Dan reg kei ‘left hand’ goes back to *kêg (NEO, keiv). Next come words with root final t, for example, Dan kejtet ‘left-handed, awk-ward,’ kejthåndet ‘left-handed,’ and kejte ‘left hand’

(cf Sc katy-handed ‘left-handed’) and words with root final k: OI keikja ‘bend back,’ from keikr ‘bent backward.’ A near synonym of keikja in the zero grade is OI kikna ‘give way at the knees’ (kikna must be the etymon of E kick, as Skeat suggested;

OED and ODEE deny the connection and call kick a word of unknown origin). Alongside kei-f, kei-g, kei-k, and kei-t, kei-p has been recorded. The ety-mology of OI keipr ‘oarlock, rowlock’ (see sec 4, above) is debatable, but several scholars (Torp in NEO, keip, and see the references in AEW, keipr) treat keipr and keikr as related.

EDD lists several words with final k and g (from all over England) that resemble keikja, keck-fisted, -handed, cack-handed, and cag-handed (the last two sometimes end in -fisted) ‘left-handed; clumsy, awkward.’ From Warwickshire, EDD has keggy and ceggy ‘left-handed.’ Keggle and kiggle ‘be un-stable, stand insecurely’ appear to be related to cag- and keggy. The northern forms keck and kecker may also belong here. A kecker is “the bar which con-nects the body of a cart with thills; a piece of wood or iron in front of a tumbril to enable the body of a cart to be raised to any angle. ...When the cart is kecked, the front is raised, and a peg is put into one of the holes in the kecker to keep it at the re-quired angle” (EDD). The verb keck can mean

‘twist to one side.’ AHD³ (cack-handed, chiefly Brit-ish ‘left-handed; awkward, chumsy’) offers a plau-sible etymology: “Perhaps from Old Norse keikr,

‘bent backwards’; akin to Danish keite, ‘left-handed’,” except that kejte means ‘left hand,’ while the derivation in Longman 1984 (kack-handed, the same definition, but in the opposite order ‘awk-ward, clumsy; derog[atory] ‘left-handed’) is unac-ceptable: allegedly, from E reg cack ‘excrement, muck,’ from ME cakken ‘defecate,’ from L caca¤^re.

SOD (DG, 241-42) offers a rich pallet of words for

‘left-handed’: cack-handed, cat-handed, cuddy-handed, kaggy-handed, kay-reived, keck-handed, keggy-handed, and kittaghy among others.

In all likelihood, both E reg key ‘twisted’ and the noun key (< *kaig-jo¤) belong with the words given above. The same holds for OFr ke¤^{ie and ka}¤^ie.

Key was then ‘a stick (pin, peg) with a twisted end.’ It may have been a northern word from the start. Many links connect it with Old Icelandic and modern Scandinavian dialects (however, according to ÁBM, ModI kigi ‘the front part of a beam’ is not related to OE cæ¤g), while leads to old and modern West Germanic are absent. Scyttel(s) and forescyttels testify to other Old English words for

‘key.’ They, too, designated a bar, for they represent the zero grade of sce¤otan and were thus

‘shot’ across the door like modern bolts. The phrase ı@sen scytel ‘iron bolt’ (OE) was synonymous with ı@sen steng. Bolts could also be used on wattle doors, as follows from OI loka and hur^arloka.

The disappearance of OE scyttel(s) is probably due to the fact that it was used too broadly: it also meant ‘dart, missile, arrow.’ In similar manner, shuttle ‘weaving implement,’ which emerged in texts in the 14^th century, has been recorded with the meanings ‘floodgate’ and ‘drawer.’ Anything that can be shot or shut is potentially a ‘scyttel’ or a

‘shuttle’ (see shuttle in OED). On the other hand, neither Scand *lukila, *hnukila (assuming that

*hnukila existed) nor OHG sluzzil ~ LG slutil had English cognates. E reg slot(e) ~ sloat ‘lock’ (akin to G Schloss) are borrowings from Middle Low Ger-man or Middle Dutch (OED). They are not related to slot ‘groove.’

Frisian had ka¤^{ie ~ ke}¤ie and sletel. Both may have been borrowed: the first from Scandinavian, the second from Dutch. Scandinavian dialects have not preserved a cognate of OE cæ¤g meaning ‘key,’

and this circumstance weakens the hypothesis of the northern provenance of key, but cases when a word survives as a borrowing but is lost in the lending language are not uncommon.

The Old English noun and its Old Frisian

cog-Key Key

nate must have had the same meaning. Markey’s idea that in most Germanic languages the word for

‘key’ refers to a tool, whereas in Frisian it refers to an orifice, lacks foundation. We have no evidence that the object called *kaigjo¤- needed an orifice. It was rather a bolt, a synonym of OE grindel. Fur-thermore, the key probably never derives its name from the hole into which it is inserted.

6. Proto-Old English *kaig-jo¤ gave way to

*ka¤gji, with *ai smoothed (monophthongized) but

*g still a velar stop, though palatalized as, for in-stance, in ModI elgi ‘elk,’ engi ‘meadow,’ and ergi

‘malice.’ The root ka¤g-, which meant ‘crooked, bent, twisted,’ came into contact with a near homonym and partial synonym ka°g-, not limited to the North. Consider OI kaga ‘bend forward; peep, pry, gaze’ and kovggull ‘joint in the finger or the toe’

(usually in the plural: kovglur). OI kœgill ‘small bar-rel, any small vessel; ladle’ can be understood as a diminutive of kaggi ‘keg, small wine barrel,’ an-other kag-word (it had a doublet kaggr): wooden vessels were made by weaving wattling or by in-terlacing pliant twigs (see these words in AEW and ÁBM). The geminate -gg- in kaggi and kaggr may be of expressive origin (Martinet [1937:116]). The cognates of Kegel do not necessarily have the con-notation of curvature, but those mentioned above do. The English verb kedge ‘change the position of a ship by winding in a hawser attached to a small anchor,’ that is, ‘warp a ship,’ known from texts since the 15^th century, may be related to OI kaga. In the 14^th century, cagge denoted the action described by kedge. The final consonant of kedge could arise only in a native or an Anglicized word, but like OI kaga, it refers to bending or moving sideways.

Cadge, a regional variant of kedge, is even closer to kaga.

The following picture emerges from the expo-sition offered here. A Scandinavian root *kaig-

‘crooked, curved, twisted, bent, oblique’ alternated with *kaif-, *kaik-, *kait-, and probably *kaip-. It was the base of several verbs, adjectives, and nouns.

One of those adjectives entered northern English and Frisian dialects; its reflex is E reg key ‘left.’

Some local designation of a device for fastening a door (a stick with its end turned down or bent), namely *kaigjo¤-, reached the north of England and Frisian dialects before i-umlaut, the palatalization of g and the monophthongization of Proto-Old English *ai to a¤. English adopted it as a feminine jo¤-stem, but the word never acquired one standard form: in the feminine, it vacillated between the strong and the weak declension (cæ¤^{g and cæ}¤^{ge) and} could also be a weak masculine noun (cæ¤ga). After

the monophthongization of *ai, the word was pro-nounced *ka¤gji or *ka¤gi and interacted with syno-nyms having the root *ka°g-. The late occurrence of cæ¤g(e) and cæ¤g(a) in Old English texts (no recorded examples before the year 1000) does not necessarily mean that they had reached southern dialects only by the end of the 10^th century.

7. Key ‘low island,’ in place names, is a differ-ent word, and OED explained its origin correctly (key sb³ and cay). The spelling of Key must have been affected by the English noun key. From an etymological point of view, it is the same word as quay, and it goes back to Sp cayo ‘shoal, rock, bar-rier reef.’ Later research (Friederici and DCECH, cayo) adds nothing new to this information. FEW II:46b states that the pronunciation of Key is the result of the confusion of the two homonyms in English, but the pronunciation of quay shows that it is not necessary to posit the influence of key on Key.

The literature on Florida place names (books, dis-sertations, newspaper articles) contains discussion of the origin of particular names like Key West but not of the word Key. The only exception is McMul-len Jr (1953).

The other words spelled key, for instance, key

‘clef,’ developed from the basic meaning of key.

Only key ‘pericarp of certain trees,’ briefly men-tioned above, looks problematic, but the explana-tion in OED appears adequate. See key sb³IV.14: ‘a dry fruit with a thin membranous wing, usually growing in bunches, as in the ash and sycamore’

and the 1562 quotation: “They are called in Eng-lishe ashe Keyes, because they hangh in bunches, after the manner of Keyes.”

A Note on OI kovvgurbarn and G mit Kind und Kegel

In the history of the k-g words referring to cur-vature, OI kovgurbarn ‘infant’ and G Kegel ‘ninepin’

are of special interest. The latter is also known from the phrase mit Kind und Kegel ‘with the whole family’ and is extant as the last names Kegl, Kegel-mann, and Kögel (KS). OI kovgurbarn (akin to Far køgilsbarn, Nynorsk koggebarn: AEW) carries a strong overtone of contempt. A despised child was most often born out of wedlock, and, as could be expected, MHG kegel meant ‘bastard.’ Seebold (KS, Kegel) is not sure whether Kegel and kovgurbarn are related. They probably are, and OScand *kov^gurr may have been a word of much stronger abuse than its Old Icelandic reflex.

AEW suggests the derivation of kov^gur(barn) from kagi (‘low bush’ in Modern Icelandic). In light of the widespread syncretism of branch,

Key Key

shoot, stump / child in Germanic, this suggestion makes sense (the same in Holthausen [1900]), but it leaves out of account the negative connotations of kovgurr and Kegel. Couldn’t these words contain reference to crookedness and hence illegitimacy, a conceptual ancestor of bend sinister? The idea of curvature is especially strong in the words with the infix n: OI kengr ‘bend, hook’ (E kink and akimbo reached English from Low German and Scandina-vian respectively; both contain the same root as kengr), kovngurváfa and kovngulvafa ‘spider’ (spinner, like G Spinne ‘spider’), kovngur ‘texture,’ and kov^ngull

‘cluster of grapes or other berries,’ reminiscent of E key ‘pericarp of an ash.’ Proto-Scand *kankur, which yielded OI kakki (only in vatnkakki ‘water basin’) and kovkkr ‘ball’ (ModI kökkur ‘lump, clod’;

Nynorsk kokk ~ kakk ‘small wooden vessel’), be-longs here too.

If OI kovgurr ‘quilt with a fringe, counterpane, bed cover, pall (over a coffin)’ is a native word, it is not akin to kovgur, as follows from Russ kovër ‘rug, carpet,’ earlier also ‘thick cloth for carrying or per-haps burying a dead body.’ We seem to be dealing with a migratory culture word, whose association with kovgurbarn is due to folk etymology. See Fritzner (1883:28-29), Detter (1898:56), Sahlgren (1928:258-71), H. Andersen (1930), M. Olsen (1940), Elmevik (1974), IsEW (323-24), and AEW (kov^gurr, with references to earlier etymologies). Consider also Götze’s fanciful etymology of Kegel in Kind und Kegel [1921:287] that can be found in all the editions of KM. None of those authors, except partly J. de Vries, is ready to dissociate kov^{gurr from} kovgurbarn. On the Icelandic place name Kov^{gurr see} Jónsson (1916:78).

KITTY-CORNER (1890)

Kitty- in corner (as in the drug store is kitty-corner from the gas station) is a jocular substitution for or a folk etymology of cater-corner, through a possible intermedi-ate stage catty-corner. Numerous compounds have cintermedi-ater- as their first element. The verb cater ‘place diagonally’ was first recorded in the middle of the 16^th century. The compounds with cater- occur mainly in dialects, and their attestation does not predate the end of the 18^th century; the only exception is cater-cousin (1547). Attempts to trace cater- to F quatre

‘four’ and (for cater-cousin) to cater ‘supply food’ did not yield satisfactory results. Cater- means ‘across, askew, diago-nally,’ and its etymon was probably some Danish word like Dan kejte ‘left hand’ or kejtet ‘clumsy.’ Folk etymology con-nected cater-corner with cat, and cater-cousin with cater

‘supply food.’ Some evidence points to a synonymous root of similar form, namely Gmc kat-, but it seems to have left no traces in English.

The sections are devoted to 1) the dating of kitty-corner, 2) the Scandinavian origin of cater-, 3) the etymology of cater-cousin, and 4) words with the root kat- and the possibility of projecting the roots of cater- and kat- words to Proto-Indo-European.

1. According to DARE, kitty-corner was first