THE TERMINATION -BY.
(Vol. vii., p. 536.)
I would suggest a doubt, whether the suffix -by, in the names of places, affords us any satisfactory evidence, per se, of their exclusively Danish origin. This termination is of no unfrequent occurrence in districts, both in this country and elsewhere, to which the Danes, properly so called, were either utter strangers, or wherein they at no time established any permanent footing. The truth is, there seems to be a fallacy in this Danish theory, in so far as it rests upon the testimony of language; for, upon investigation, we generally find that the word or phrase adduced in its support was one recognised, not in any single territory alone, but throughout the whole of Scandinavia, whose different tribes, amid some trifling variations of dialect, which can now be scarcely ascertained, were all of them as readily intelligible to one another as are, at this day, the inhabitants of two adjoining English counties. If this were so, it appears that, in the case before us, nothing can be proved from the existence of the expression, beyond the fact of its Norse origin; and our reasonable and natural course is, if we would arrive at its true signification, to refer at once to the parent tongue of the Scandinavian nations, spoken in common, and during a long-continued period, amid the snows of distant Iceland, on the mountains of Norway, the plains of Denmark, and in the forests of Sweden.
This ancient and widely-diffused language was the Icelandic, Norman, or Dönsk tunga,—that in which were written the Eddas and Skálda, the
Njála and Heimskringla. In it we have the suffix by, under the forms of the verbs ek bý, ek bió, or at búa, and ek byggi or byggia, manere, habitare, incolere, struere, edificare; also the nouns bú (Ang.-Sax. bý, Dan. bo, by), domus, habitaculum; and búi, incola, colonus, vicinus; closely assimilated expressions all of them, in which the roots are found of our English words bide, abide, be, by (denoting proximity), build, borough, bury (Edmondsbury), barrow, byre, bower, abode, &c. Now, these explanations undoubtedly confirm the interpretation assigned by Mr. E. S. Taylor to his terminating syllable; and it is probable enough that the villages to which he refers received their titles from the Danes, who, we know, on the subjugation of its former inhabitants, possessed themselves of the country in which they are situated. This, however, is a begging the question; for, resting simply on the evidence of the suffix, it is equally probable that these places preserved the names assigned to them by their former northern colonists. But our bý or búa, Ang.-Sax. bugan and beón, and the Germ. (ich) bin and bauen, have all been referred by learned philologists to the Greek φύω, or to βιόω, or to παύω, παύομαι; and the word has affinities scattered throughout numerous languages (there are the Camb.-Brit. bydio, habitare, and byw, vivere, for instance), so that we are surrounded by difficulties, if we attempt to establish from its use any such point as that involved in your correspondent's Query.
Cowgill.