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ArchivesRe: Marvin = "famous friend", "marrow famous" ?
in reply to a message by Anneza
Thanks a lot for the details. (and nice to hear from you too.) Of late, I have become somewhat interested in the semantic space and the reason I asked was because to me whether a personal or sexual `mate' can shift to become a workmate or colleague (or rather how common the shift is: anything is possible) is ultimately an empirical question.
So I moved my rear end (as they would say on this side of the pond, except less euphemistically) and accessed the OED and the magnifying glasses (with advancing years, the value of anteing up for the electronic edition seems to be increasing) and found:
Oxford English Dictionary claims that this second marrow (attested 15th century onwards instead of the first marrow 8th century onwards) is `Of obscure origin. The localities would seem to point to a Scandinavian origin, but no possible Scandinavian source is known, unless indeed the sense of the English substantive can have been developed from that of Old Norse marg.r (literally `many') friendly, communicative. Phonologically this etymon would be admissible as the word occurs so late that the absence of recorded forms with guttural causes no difficulty.'
Now, OED goes ahead and classifies marrow in the sense of spouse under this second marrow and not under the first! Even though, it is attested from the 16th century, even though one has a term half-marrow, and even though in the 16th and 17th centuries love used to melt one's marrows (as stated in the second subsense of the first marrow)! Curious: but cannot be resolved without more work, which I do not have time for right now.
In any case, I do not think from this that the two marrows are cognate: the -e- -a- problem that you noted is probably real.
Now what does it mean for the name? Well, this site claims that the Welsh Merfyn which possibly means marrow famous is from 9th century. We would now need to know whether the dialectical marrow meaning friend in English of Scandinavian origin which the OED speaks about was already there in Welsh in the 9th century, and whether the Welsh element in the name could refer to it. I remain agnostic as to that without further work.
Incidentally, Wordsworth's Yarrow Unvisited does not have winsome marrow in that stanza, but yes, he does use it elsewhere in the same poem as a rhyme for yarrow. And `winsome marrow' has been reused often.
So I moved my rear end (as they would say on this side of the pond, except less euphemistically) and accessed the OED and the magnifying glasses (with advancing years, the value of anteing up for the electronic edition seems to be increasing) and found:
Oxford English Dictionary claims that this second marrow (attested 15th century onwards instead of the first marrow 8th century onwards) is `Of obscure origin. The localities would seem to point to a Scandinavian origin, but no possible Scandinavian source is known, unless indeed the sense of the English substantive can have been developed from that of Old Norse marg.r (literally `many') friendly, communicative. Phonologically this etymon would be admissible as the word occurs so late that the absence of recorded forms with guttural causes no difficulty.'
Now, OED goes ahead and classifies marrow in the sense of spouse under this second marrow and not under the first! Even though, it is attested from the 16th century, even though one has a term half-marrow, and even though in the 16th and 17th centuries love used to melt one's marrows (as stated in the second subsense of the first marrow)! Curious: but cannot be resolved without more work, which I do not have time for right now.
In any case, I do not think from this that the two marrows are cognate: the -e- -a- problem that you noted is probably real.
Now what does it mean for the name? Well, this site claims that the Welsh Merfyn which possibly means marrow famous is from 9th century. We would now need to know whether the dialectical marrow meaning friend in English of Scandinavian origin which the OED speaks about was already there in Welsh in the 9th century, and whether the Welsh element in the name could refer to it. I remain agnostic as to that without further work.
Incidentally, Wordsworth's Yarrow Unvisited does not have winsome marrow in that stanza, but yes, he does use it elsewhere in the same poem as a rhyme for yarrow. And `winsome marrow' has been reused often.
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