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Thoughts on the origin and descent of the Gael
Thoughts on the origin and descent of the Gael Author:James Grant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: cd from the old word, which was pronounced mesis, as appears from characters inscribed on old monuments. The Latin annus, the Greek auann, a year, is derived ... more »from the Gaelic ainn, also pronounced in the nominativeymw, a ring or orbit. Of this circumstance the Latin annulus furnishes evidence. The period of a year figured in the imagination as the completion of a circle or ring, and hence the word applied to the one came to signify the other. It may here be observed, that the Latin word circulus is the Gaelic word circle or cercle, which signifies a ftpof, xone, or girdle. The Greek word /? is a compound of cua, round, and cul, back ; a circle always presenting a round back. The common word for year in Gaelic is blighan, from a circumstance of great importance in pastoral life, the return of that season when cattle give milk, bligh a bho, milk the cow. Ratis, Scapha, Navis. The inhabitants of a country washed by rivers must have been very early acquainted with the use of some machine fit to convey them by water from one side of a river to the other. As wood is Oibelin. M?nde Primitif, vol. iv. p. 132. of lighter specific gravity than water, and on that element presents to the eye a floating body, it would readily occur, even to the rudest and most uncultivated beings of the human race, as a proper vehicle for transporting persons or things, to and from places separated from each other by water. The first of these vehicles was, as may be naturally supposed, of an extremely rude and simple construction. This machine was the rath of the Gael, the ratis of the Latins, the ex,1 of the Greeks. Isidorus describes the rath of the Gael, when he tells what was understood by the ratis of the Latins. Ratis primum et antiquissimum, genus na- vigii, e rudibus tignis asserib...« less