Two etymological updates

Toward the end of August, I blogged about the etymology of the toponym, Pakistan. In the comments, my friend Gary and I discussed what we did and didn’t know about the word ferengi, with its apparent meaning of “foreigner”. Two points to make about this. First, surprisingly, the word (spelled ferenghi) is scattered all through Lloyd Alexander’s latest (and last) novel, The Golden Dream of Carlo Chuchio, which I am reviewing for Mythprint. There, it’s used with essentially the same meaning of “foreigner” or more specifically, “European”. Second, I continued to search around for better evidence of the word’s sources and meaning, and I finally found it in a Somali dictionary: “ferenji masculine noun: white infidel, non-Islamic European person.” That is to say, very close indeed to kafir, which we were also discussing.

Then, going all the way back to June, I wrote about the etymology of another toponym, Stonehenge. Funny I would have forgotten this, but Tolkien makes clear his own view in the essay, “English and Welsh”, where he writes:

There stands still in what is now England the ruinous fragment of an ancient monument that we have long called in our English fashion Stonehenge, ‘the suspended stones’, remem­bering nothing of its history. [1]

Isn’t the writing here wonderful? I had mentioned Old English hangian “to hang, suspend” in my discussion, and here we have Tolkien’s agreement with that theory on record. I can’t help but think he would also have liked the Hengest interpretation, as I also wrote at the time. Lucky I came across this while reading the essay again (for another purpose altogether).

[1] Tolkien, J.R.R. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983, p.175.