W. S. G.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Nao, for Naw, for Ship (Vol. iv., pp. 28. 214.).
—I am obliged to GOMER for his reference to Davies. In the cited passages from Taliesin and Meigant, heb naw means without being able to swim. The word nawv drops its final letter in order to furnish the rhyme. That appears, not only from the rejection of the word by all lexicographers, but from one of the manuscripts of Meigant, which actually writes it nawv. I esteem Davies's translation to be Daviesian.
By way of a gentle pull at the torques, I will observe, that I am not in the habit of proving that people "did not possess" a thing, but of inquiring for the evidence that they did. And when I find that tattooed and nearly naked people used coracles, and do not find that they used anything grander, I am led to suspect they did not.
My answer to the Query, whether it be probable that British warriors went over to Gaul in coracles is, "Yes, highly so." Rude canoes of various sorts convey the expeditions of savage islanders in all seas. And the coracle rendered the Scots of Erin formidable to the Roman shores of Gaul and Britain. I do not see that the Dorsetshire folk being "water-dwellers" (if so be they were such) proved them to have used proper ships, any more than their being "water-drinkers" would prove them to have used glasses or silver tankards.
No doubt the name ναῦς is of the remotest heroic antiquity, and the first osier bark covered with hides, or even the first excavated alder trunk, may have been so termed; in connexion with the verbal form nao, contract. no, nas, pret. navi, to float or swim. But to "advance that opinion" as to Britain, because two revolted Roman subjects in this province used the word in the sixth and seventh centuries after Christ, would be late and tardy proof of the fact; even supposing that the two bards in question had made use of such a noun, which I dispute.
A. N.
[This communication should have preceded that in No. 99., p. 214.]