The Plot of Arnold and Sir Henry Clinton against the United States, and against General Washington, Paris, 1816. Printed by Didot the Elder.
Niles' Weekly Register for 1817, vol. ii. p. 386. Printed at Baltimore.
Anon.
THE TERMINATIONS "-BY" AND "-NESS."
The linguistic origin of these descriptive syllables, when found as suffixes to the names of places, is a question of some interest to the antiquary and ethnologist; and, as to the former of them, has, on that account, fitly enough been made the subject of occasional discussion in the pages of "N. & Q." The -by, as your pages evince (Vol. vii., p. 536.), is implicitly relied upon by Mr. Worsaae and his disciples, in support of the Danish theory of that eminent northern scholar; and that too, as it appears, without any very minute regard to the etymology and meaning of the former syllabic divisions of proper names so characterised. If only the designation of a locality end with -by, evidence sufficient is given, that it owes its paternity specially to the Danes alone, of all the Scandinavian tribes who obtained a permanent footing on our shores. The same is the case with respect to the termination -ness, and its orthographic varieties. As with the Ashbys, Newbys, and Kirbys of our several counties, so (inter alia) with the Hackness of Yorkshire, the Longness of Man, the Bowness of Westmoreland, and the Foulness of Essex. All have the Danish mark upon them; and all, therefore, possess a Danish original, and bear witness of a Danish location.
With regard to the -by, I have already, in these pages, taken occasion to suggest a doubt whether, in that particular instance, the Worsaaen theory be not as fallacious as it is dogmatical. And, adopting the same method with the -ness, I think it will be evident, on examination of the following list of almost identical forms of the expression, that, as to this point also, no argument can be founded upon it, one way or the other, beyond the fact of its derivation from some of the Scandinavian tribes who, in the fifth and succeeding centuries, established themselves on our shores: if, indeed, I do not, even with this enlarged extension, assign to the presence of the term in our topography a too restricted application.
I have a list now before me of 521 places with this suffix, distributed over twenty-five counties. It does not pretend to be complete; but as it offers a more extended view of the question than in Vol. ix., p. 136., I subjoin the results:
| Yorkshire | 173 |
| Lincolnshire | 163 |
| Leicestershire | 49 |
| Norfolk | 22 |
| Cumberland | 21 |
| Westmoreland | 18 |
| Northamptonshire | 17 |
| Lancashire | 14 |
| Nottinghamshire | 14 |
| Suffolk and Derbyshire, 5 each | 10 |
| Durham and Warwickshire, 3 each | 6 |
| Essex and Isle of Man, 2 each | 4 |
| Cardiganshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Kent, Monmouthshire, Northumberland, Pembrokeshire, Salop, and Wiltshire, 1 each | 10 |
| 521 |
Our termination -ness, then, is the old northern or Icelandic nes, the parent of the Dan. næs, and the Ang.-Sax. nese and næs, signifying "a neck of land, or promontory." From this nes came, naturally enough, the old northern naos or nös, whence the Dan. næse, the Germ. nase; the Ang.-Sax. nase, næse, nose; the Norman-Fr. naz, and Su.-Goth. naese (in Al. and Sansc. nasa, and in Gall. nes); the Latin nasus, and Eng. nose, or nase as it is spelt by Gower in his Conf. Am. b. v., "Both at mouth and at nase." Closely akin to the same word, and probably derived from an identical source, is the old northern nef, whence were formed the Vulg.-Isl. nebbi, the Dan. neb, and the Ang.-Sax. nebbe and neb (in Pers. anef; in C. Tscherh. ep, in Curd. defin), the beak or bill, the neb or nib of a bird; and also used of the prominent feature of the human face divine, to which the term is applied by Shakspeare and Bacon, as it is occasionally at the present day by the older inhabitants of the Yorkshire dales.