Warmington.
The Word "shunt" (Vol. iii., p. 204.).
—I can confirm what MR. WAY says on this word. I have looked for the word in all the dictionaries and glossaries I could lay my hands upon, both in this country and abroad, but in vain. Singular enough, however, I have found it in the small edition of Bailey, and in Dr. Ash's Dictionary.
In reading the other day Victor Hugo's Notre Dame, I met with the word Pignon, which has exactly the same signification as the Welsh word Piniwn, the gable or pine end of a house. Is the French word derived from the Welsh, or the Welsh from the French? or is the coincidence in sound and sense purely accidental? Perhaps some of your Welsh correspondents can explain this.
E. JONES.
Aberayron, Cardiganshire.
St. Paul's Quotation of Heathen Writers (Vol. v., p. 278.).
—Acts xiv. 17. Ὑετὸς does not occur, according to the Indexes, in Sophocles, Euripides, or Pindar.
The style of the Hellenizing Jews was sometimes very poetical, as in the Wisdom of Solomon: but in one of the most inflated passages in that book, it does not go so far as οὐρανόθεν. It says only ἀπ' οὐρανῶν. Nor does Wetstein quote οὐρανόθεν from any author but Homer. Hesiod might have been added (Passow), but that is the same thing. It seems a word unfit for prose.
Καιρὸς καρποφόρος is quoted by Wetstein from Achmet.