Talk:quercus

Celtic etymology
A recent book about oaks says that the term "quercus" derives from the Celtic quer ("fine") + cuez ("tree")? Is that incorrect? I can't find a trace of this in the current version of this entry. 173.88.246.138 00:50, 14 April 2021 (UTC)


 * First of all, "Celtic" isn't a language, it's a group of related languages. Second, they probably got that from this 1830 work, which got it from who knows where. It's the kind of obsolete hogwash that I was talking about in this discussion a few months ago. In 1830, Indo-European comparative linguistics was fairly new, and the relationship of the Celtic languages to the other Indo-European languages was still being worked out. Etymologies such as this one were already obsolete, but a botanist couldn't have been expected to be aware of the latest in other fields. As for the reconstruction itself, it's not completely random or made-up, but it's hard to figure out how anyone could have arrived at those particular forms. I'm not sure about the "quer" part, but see for some of what might have contributed to the "cuez" part.  Chuck Entz (talk) 14:20, 14 April 2021 (UTC)