CELTIC ETYMOLOGY.
(Vol. viii., pp. 229. 551.)
Your correspondent is a very Antæus. He has fallen again upon uim, and he rises up from it to defend the Heapian pronunciation with renewed vigour. But I cannot admit that he has proved the pedigree of humble from the Gaelic.
But, even if uim were the root of a Sanscrit word, and not itself a derivative, still the many stages through which the derivation undoubtedly passes, without any need of reference to the Gaelic, are quite enough to establish the existence and continuance of an aspirate, until we arrive at the French; and it has already been proved, that many words which lose the aspirate in French do not lose it in English. The progress from the Sanscrit is very clear:
Sanscrit. Kshama.
Pracrit. Khama.
Old Greek. Χάμα; whence χάμαι, χάμαζε, χθαμαλός.
Latin. Humus, humilis.
Italian. Umile; because there is in Italian no initial aspirate.
French. ’Humble; because in words of Latin origin the French almost always omit the aspirate.
English. ‘Humble.
And here it may be observed, that humilis never had, except in the Vulgate and in ecclesiastical writers, the metaphorically Christian sense to which its derivatives in modern tongues are generally confined, and to which I believe the Gaelic umhal to be strictly confined. But the original words for humble are iosal and iriosal, cognate with the Irish iosal and iriseal, and the Cymric isel; and the olden and more established words for the earth are, both in Gaelic and Irish, talamh and lar, cognate with the Cymric llawr.
All these facts lead to a reasonable suspicion that uim, umhal, and umhailteas (an evident naturalisation of a Latin word) are all derived from Latin at a comparatively recent date, as certainly as umile, humilde, ’humble, and ‘humble are, and in the same Christian sense. The omission of an aspirate in the Gaelic word is then easily accounted for, without supposing it not to exist in other languages, and for this very simple reason, that no Gaelic word commences with h. There are some Celtic roots undoubtedly in the Latin language. It would be difficult, for example, to derive mœnia, munire, gladius, vir, and virago from any other origin, but much the larger number of words, in which the two languages resemble each other, are either adoptions from the Latin or derivatives from one common source, e. g. mathair and mother, brathair and brother, as well as the Latin mater and frater, from the Sanscrit matri and bhratri, &c., as all comparative philologists are well aware. Would your correspondents call it the ’Ebrew language, because a Gael calls it, as he must do, Eabrach?
E. C. H.