Thousands of pages were screened for everything said in any language at any time about the origin of English words.
That is why, when I embarked on writing a new etymological dictionary of English, I first put together a huge database. Panning for gold involves a lot of sifting. No matter that many conjectures are naïve or even silly. Modern explorers never begin from scratch and naturally want to know the hypotheses of their predecessors. Even if we agree that with a few exceptions our concern for the history of etymology need not go beyond the nineteenth century, the number of guesses about the sources of Greek, Latin, Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, and Romance words is huge. Those interested in etymology should also be interested in how specialists discover word origins. It turned up in Medieval Latin, and no one knows for sure where it came from. Yet hundreds of words in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other Romance languages, including even Italian, either do not have indisputable Latin sources or are not traceable to any Latin roots, so that their early history is as hard to find out as the history of many English, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian words. The problems facing Romance etymologists are, in principle, not different from those familiar to students of Germanic, except that the Romance languages go back to Latin, while Proto-Germanic is a reconstructed language. My most successful inroad on this area was probably an essay on bigot, but only because I discovered a review of which no one seems to be aware. Whenever I do it, I feel out of my element and indulge in a goodly amount of hedging. Romance etymology is not my turf, though from time to time I discuss English words of French origin. Today I am returning to brave, a better-informed and more cautious man.
My comment brought forward a counter-comment by Peter Maher and resulted in an exchange of many letters between us, so that this post owes its appearance to him. One of the minor questions addressed in my latest “gleanings” concerned the origin of the adjective brave.
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