Re: Breton, Cornish & French

"John Briggs" <john.briggs4@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:FiB9k.135557$8k.94975@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Michael Lightfoot wrote:
>>
>> The name derives from Old English Sumors?te, which is short for
>> Sumortuns?te, meaning "the people living at or dependent upon
>> Sumortun".[2] The first known use of the name Somersæte was in 845,
>> after the region fell to the Saxons.[3] Sumortun is modern Somerton
>> and may mean "summer settlement", a farmstead occupied during the
>> summer but abandoned in the winter.[4] However, Somerton is not down
>> on the levels-lower ground, where only summer occupation was possible
>> because of flooding-but on a hill where winter occupation would have
>> been feasible. An alternative suggestion is that the name derives
>> from Seo-mere-saetan meaning "settlers by the sea lakes".[5]
>>
>> ---
>>
>> I will leave it to others to check the four sources (the numbers in
>> square brackets) by going to Wikipedia or other reputable sites and
>> reading for themselves.
>
> Yes, yes - but Phil has been told all this before, and has ignored it.
> -- 

Well I thank Michael Lightfoot for a topical contribution, but John Briggs

never said anything on any subject which is his own knowledge from his
life 
except to excoriate my highland experience by his own visits to the A35.
Why 
he should intercept these messages from that basis is known to
Saxon-proxies 
alone?   ;)

I wonder if John Lightfoot has consulted Mary Caine on this topic? She
goes 
rather deeper than the 'reputable Wikipedia.'


ROFL



I do note in passing that in Donne's Poems he offers Somersault as the
same 
as Summerset, the written source being Palsgrave:

    The valters somersalts, or us'd to wooe

The interpretation of  -- "Seo-mere-saetan meaning "settlers by the sea 
lakes"

is evidently of Roman times [though uncited to source] and thereby
pre-Saxon 
and Celtic, though of course the "saetan" is unexplained thereby not being

any word in Latin, and if it does not mean 'Giants' as is the biblical 
reference [4th C].

Phil Innes

> John Briggs
>
>