(cf Du klei and G Klei), because clover prefers sandy and loamy soils, that is, from the word clay.
His etymology has never been discussed. Baader (1953:39-40) traced the West Germanic name of clover to the “East European” root *gel- ~ *gloi-
‘bright, shining.’ It is not sticky juice but intense color that is typical of clover, he said. Clover comes in several colors, but their intensity is about average, and the distance from *gel- ~ *gloi- ‘bright, happy, shining’ to MHG kleine ‘shining, dainty’
hardly leads to *’white, reddish,’ as Mitzka (KM, Klee) points out. Seebold (KS, Klee) mentions Baader’s article without comment, and no one ex-cept Cohen (1972b:2/26) shared Baader’s opinion.
7) B. van den Berg (1954:186-87) did not offer a new etymology of Du klaver but suggested that its protoform was *klâwaz, an es/os-stem, with
*klâwira as its plural. The word for ‘clover’ often occurs in the plural (see Prior’s etymology above), and Pogatscher assigned *klaiwaz (not *kla¤waz) to the es/os-stem long before Van den Berg, who may have been unaware of this fact.
3. The traditional reconstruction of the proto-form *klaib¤r(i)on shies away from the question of why two forms—with and without i—existed. Of interest is Foerste’s observation (1954:405-08; first, very briefly, as in 1955:3) that 椤 in cl椤fre does not have to be the umlaut of a¤¤, for it can go back di-rectly to Gmc 椤 (Go e¤¤1, WGmc *a¤¤). Instead of
*klaib¤ron and *klaib¤rion, with i posited only to ac-count for an allegedly umlauted vowel, he ob-tained the doublets cla¤fra (< *klaib¤ron) and clæ¤fre (<
*kla¤b¤ron). Foerste cited several other word pairs in which old *ai seems to have alternated with *a¤; Weijnen (1981:136) gave two more examples.
None of those forms is fully convincing, and no reasons for the alternation have been offered. Yet Foerste’s reconstruction has potential and can per-haps be accepted as a working hypothesis. Dutch and Low German dialects also have klever and klaver. Previous explanations of a were of two kinds: that it is of Frisian origin (an improbable hypothesis in light of OE cla¤fre) or that it is an Ingvaeonic feature. In addition to the works al-ready mentioned, see Heeroma’s discussion (1937:262-63, 265) of the “â map” in the linguistic atlas of Dutch (1949:30) and the bibliography in Brok’s edition of Heukels (Heukels [1987:LXI]).
Foerste did not address the problem of mono-syllabic forms (like G Klee) versus dimono-syllabic ones
(like Du klaver and E clover). According to Van den Berg (1954:191-92), *-wr- became *-vr- in klaver, and some examples in Dutch dialects bear out his statement. But -fr- in the Old English forms needs another explanation. For this reason, Foerste re-jected Van den Berg’s etymology (likewise, Lerchner [1965:143]).
The Germanic suffix *-ro was used in the naming of various trees. Such are OE apuldre (OHG affoltra or apaldr) ‘apple tree,’ mapuldre ‘ma-ple,’ and many others. A reflex of *-ro shows up in G Holunder ‘juniper’ and possibly Flieder ‘lilac.’
Not only tree names have this suffix or a complex that came to be associated with it: it is also present in E dodder and madder (ME doder; OE mædere). The meaning of *-ro (perhaps ‘bearer’) was forgotten early, whence such creations of folk etymology as OE æppeltre (æppeltre¤ow), MLG mapeldorn, and so forth. After Sievers (1878:523-24) clarified the meaning and origin of *-ro in plant names, no one added anything new to his reconstruction. Only Wyld (UED, heather) pointed out that in Old Eng-lish, the formative element of plant names -re had come into being, as in OE ampre ‘dock, sorrel’ and cla¤fre ‘clover’ (ampre is a reshaping of an adjective meaning ‘bitter’; compare G Ampfer < OHG ampfara
~ ampfaro). His observation seems to be relevant also for Frisian, Low German, and Dutch, but it need not be assumed that -re is a continuation of
*-ro. The most natural etymology of OE cla¤¤fre ~ cl椤fre would be *claiw- ~ *cl椤w- with the forma-tive element -re. The suffixed forms *cla¤¤w- ~ cl椤w- + -re (ra) would also explain parallel forms with -b-: the group wr- was preserved in Old English intact (contrary to German and Dutch), but in the middle of the word it did not occur and was transformed into -fr- (pronounced [vr]) or -br-.
4. An equally difficult part of the etymology of clover is the semantics of this plant name. FT’s idea that clover is akin to cleave ‘adhere’ can be ac-cepted. Some property of clover made people associate it with a sticky, adhesive mass. A se-mantic parallel to clover is Icel smári ‘clover.’
Smári, along with its doublet smæra, surfaced only at the end of the 17th century, but it must be old, for its cognates exist in Faroese and in the dialects of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish (Nilsson [1984];
ÁBM, smári, smæra). The etymology of smári has been discussed sporadically and insufficiently.
Jacob Grimm (1865:121) looked on it as a borrow-ing from Celtic: he cited Ir seamar, seamrog and Wel samrog, the etymon of E shamrock, Icel (he errone-ously said “Old Icelandic”) smári, and Dan
(Jut-Clover Clover
Clover Clover
land) smære (his spelling is smäre).
Bugge (1899:455-56/30) could not imagine that smári is a Celtic word and traced it to *smáirhon (<
*smar\kon-). He reconstructed the Proto-Celtic form as *sembrako- (< *semrako-). *Smar- and *semr- emerged as different grades of ablaut of the same base. The Irish word appears in FT(N), but later Falk and Torp concluded that seamar, like OE sym-mering-wyrt ‘violet’ or ‘anemone’ (Förster [1917:
139/2] thought it was a variety of malva), is related to the Germanic word for ‘summer’ and expunged it from the German translation (FT(G), see smære in both editions). However, they never shared Bugge’s view of the origin of smári and compared it with OE smæ¤ras ‘lips’ (pl). They explained the name smári as ‘leppeblomst,’ that is, ‘lip flower’
(the same gloss in NEO, smære), allegedly because of some similarity between clover flowers and lips.
FT’s later etymology of Ir seamar ‘clover’ also seems to have been abandoned. WP II:624-25 and Pokorny (1949-50:135) derive seamar from PIE
*stembros ‘stalk.’
FT’s etymology of smári is even less credible than Walther’s (“clover is like a berry”). Reference to L laburnum does not help, for laburnum is a tree whose bright yellow, pear-shaped flowers do not resemble clover. The origin of the Latin word is unknown, and its association with labia ‘lip’ is due to folk etymology. Charpentier (1912:140-41) sup-ported enthusiastically the idea that smári is related to OE ga¤lsmæ¤re ‘jocose, frivolous,’ a word men-tioned in FT. He noted that the root *smei- ~ *smi- (as in E smile) meant both ‘laugh’ and ‘bloom.’ His observation is correct (see also Petersson [1916:290]), but the connection between laughter and flowers goes much deeper than he thought, for laughter was considered in many cultures to be a giver of life. The motif is too broad to be invoked in any etymology. See Propp (1984: no 9, esp p.
137 “Flowers That Bloom at Someone’s Smile”; first published in 1939). Charpentier may have missed Benfey (1875), and Benfey was apparently unaware of the Icelandic word. In his discussion of the names of the plant hop (1875:213-16), Benfey men-tions Gk smi~lax ‘convolvulus, dodder’ (as well as
‘yew tree’) and considers the possibility of the pro-toform *smaila or *smaira in view of the Sanskrit plant name smera-. He notes that smera seems to be a derivation of *smi- ‘smile, laugh’ and refers to the bright blossoms covering many climbing plants (‘smiling’ = ‘in bloom’). “This would indeed be a very poetic designation,” he says (pp. 215-16), but adds that some poetic names may be taken back to Proto-Indo-European. He would have been
puz-zled by Icel smári, another ‘smiling’ name of a plant not famous for its brightness and not a climber.
Both etymological dictionaries of Modern Ice-landic (IEW, 909; ÁBM, smári) copied from FT, though a reasonable conjecture on the derivation of smári has been known for a long time. Holthausen (AeEW) pointed out that ga¤lsmæ¤re should be kept away from smæ¤ras and that the source of æ¤ in OE smæ¤re ‘lip’ is WGmc *æ¤ (corresponding to Go e¤1) rather than the umlaut of a¤ from *ai, as follows from the Anglian dative plural sme¤rum, and cannot be related to a¤ in smári (see also Holthausen [1941:81] and Foerste’s discussion of clæ¤fru, above;
Knobloch [1959:41] disagrees with Holthausen without giving reasons for his disagreement). The cognate of smári is, according to Holthausen, OI smjovr ~ smør ‘butter.’ E cleave ‘adhere’ is archaic, but in German, kleben and schmieren are not only synonymous but sometimes interchangeable. Smør and schmieren are closely related words.
Another semantic parallel to clover as a sticky flower is Russ kashka, the popular name of klever
‘clover.’ Kasha means ‘porridge, hot cereal’; kashka
‘pap’ is its quasi-diminutive. According to the cur-rent explanations, kashka got its name either from its flowers collected into dense heads of short spikes resembling porridge (Dal’ II:100) or from the fact that when it is ground in the hand, it feels like fine grain (Merkulova [1967:90]; ESRI II/8:105-06;
ESSI IX:159-60 lists cognates but gives no etymol-ogy). Who grinds clover in the hand and why?
With a word denoting pap (mash, pulp) we are not too far from kleben and schmieren.
The Russian word is in no way unusual.
Among the popular names of German plants, we find Pappel and Käsepappel; G pap- is a cognate of E pap (S‡tech [1959:154-55]). S‡tech notes that all those plants, when squeezed or broken, excrete thick juice, which is, or was in the past, used for medici-nal purposes. It is noteworthy how often various authors writing in German use the phrase dicker Saft ‘thick juice.’ FT and their followers refer to thick juice in their etymology of kløver and Klee.
S‡tech says dickflüssiger Saft, and in WHirt Latwerge
‘electuary’ (= dicker Heilsaft, a medicinal powder mixed with honey or syrup) is defined as durch Einkochen dicker Saft.
Medieval pharmaceutical books regularly mention clover, but its role in healing ailments is not prominent. The thick juice of clover is associ-ated, even if vaguely, with honey. The missing link between clover and stickiness (Klee and kleben, klaver and kleven, clover and cleave ‘adhere’) is the English word honeysuckle (its doublet is honeysuck),
Clover Clover
Clover Cob
which until the end of the 17th century meant ‘red clover, Trefolium pratense.’ This meaning is still alive in dialects (EDD). Honey stalks mentioned in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (IV:4, 90) are stalks of clover. Not only the cattle appreciate the sweet taste of clover.
Although the cultivation of clover started in Europe in the 16th century (first in Brabant), neither bees nor beekeepers had to wait so long. In Ki-lian’s 1599 Dutch dictionary, klauern honigh ‘clover honey’ is defined ‘mel optimum & candidissimum, ex trifolio pratensi’ (‘good, very clear honey from purple clover’); the association between clover and honey was natural to him. Wherever clover grows, children chew it (as they chew honeysuckle and sometimes lilac) and enjoy the taste of this ‘pap.’
As recently as at the end of the 19th century, poor people in Iceland put clover into their milk and ate this ‘cold cereal’ (Nilsson 1984:202). Clover is
‘sticky,’ because its thick juice is one of the main sources of honey. Other examples illustrating the connection between the juice of a tree and the product made from it include Welsh bedw ‘birch;
birch grove,’ called for the juice it excretes. Bedw is a rather secure cognate of E cud, OI kváa ‘resin,’
and G Kitt ‘putty.’ G Weichsel (OHG wîhsila) ‘bird cherry’ is akin to L viscum ‘bird lime’; bird lime was made from these berries.
In popular botanical nomenclature, the same name is often applied to several different plants, and, conversely, one plant may have many names.
The Old English glosses in which cla¤fre and clæ¤fre turn up are confusing because copyists could not know the exact meaning of cirsium, crision, calta, and other Latin words (BWA, I:35, II:23, III:52;
Cockayne [1861, II:276]). That is why Skinner based his etymology of clover on the meaning ‘vio-let,’ arguing that clover and violets have a similar smell (the same, as always, in Gazophylacium), and the pre-1864 editions of Webster’s dictionary em-phasize that “[t]he Saxon word is rendered also marigold and violet.” In the dialects of many Germanic languages, words like E hare’s foot, Sw röd-fikor, rö-tastar, Icel hrútafifl, each denoting a dif-ferent kind of clover, are widespread. So many compound words have clæ¤fre as their second ele-ment in Old English, including some exotic ones like tunor-clæ¤fre ‘bugle,’ that clæ¤fre became the name of almost any grass. Yet the main meaning of clæ¤fre ~ cla¤fre was probably the same as today, which did not prevent them from having syno-nyms. The word clæ¤fre is still discernible in nu-merous place names beginning with Clare-, Clar-, Claver-, and Clover-. Clarendon may be one of them
(Ekwall [1960:113], A. H. Smith [1956, I:96]).
5. In sum, the history of clover and its West Germanic cognates looks as follows: 1) West Ger-manic had the form *klaiwaz, most probably, an a-stem. Its direct continuation is High German Klee (< klêo(w)). 2) In English, Frisian, Dutch, and Low German, -re, a formative element of plant names, possibly extracted from < *-tro, was added to
*klaiw-, and *klaiwre yielded *klaifre [-vre] and
*klaibre. The first variant won out. *Klaifre devel-oped into OE cla¤fre (> ModE clover). 3) In early West Germanic, *ai sometimes alternated with *æ¤ (< *a¤), whence OE clæ¤fre (> ModE claver) and all continental forms with -e-. 4) Clover got its name from its sticky juice, its nectar, the base of the most popular sort of honey. The sound complex *klaiwaz must have meant ‘sticky pap.’
COB (1420?)
Cob, in its various meanings, refers to animal names, the names of round and lumpy objects, and the head. It is often confused with cop, but, as a rule, cop means only ‘head.’ The history of cop is as obscure as the history of G Kopf, L caput, and their cognates. Late convergences and ancient ties are impossible to distinguish in this group. Possibly, cob ‘animal name’ (related to cub) and cob ‘round ~ lumpy object’ are historically distinct from cob ~ cop ‘head.’ Of the animal names, only cob ‘male swan’ can be understood as ‘the head (swan).’ Cob is not a borrowing from Scandinavian or Celtic in any of its meanings. Cob ‘basket’ is perhaps related to cubby(hole). Cob ‘fight’ (v) is of unknown origin; it is not necessarily a continuation of the rare Middle English verb cob
‘fight’ (from French?). Cob ‘mixture of earth and straw’ is so called from its having been made of heavy lumps of clay. Cob
‘harbor at Lyme Regis’ may also have received its name from cob ‘roundish mass, lump’ (< ‘rounded skerry’?).
The sections are devoted to 1) the range of meanings of cob and the relations between cob and cop, 2) cob as the name of various containers, 3) cob (v) ‘fight,’ 4) the treatment of cob by Makovskii and Abaev, 5) cob ‘mixture of earth and straw,’ 6) (Sea) Cob, and 7) the family name Cobb(e). Sec-tion 8 is the conclusion.
1. OED classifies the meanings of cob as fol-lows: 1) containing the notion ‘big’ or ‘stout,’ 2) containing the notion ‘rounded,’ ‘roundish mass,’
or ‘lump,’ 3) with the notion ‘head, top.’ In addi-tion, several compounds like cob-house ‘house built by children out of corncobs, etc’ and seven other nouns spelled cob or cobb are known. OED gives them as homonyms of cob. Du kobbe, apparently related to cob, is equally polysemous: Heeroma (1941-42:51).
For etymological purposes it is more advan-tageous to divide the meanings of cob into
Clover Cob
Cob Cob
1) those referring to animals, 2) those referring to