straif

I like that - "Dog's eyes!". It sounds like it ought to be a Shakespearean curse Fie on you!

My class teacher when I was 7 years old (back in England) was interested in the Roman - Saxon - Danish - Norman history of the district. She taught us how to spot Saxon place names (the -ham suffix meaning 'home') [Chatham, Borham etc]; the -ing suffix meaning something like 'kin' [Braughing = the village of Braugha's people].

Later, although I was reading sciences, the dean (or 'master') of our college was the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who has worked on tracing the movement of Indo-European people through the development of the modern European languages - I don't remember exactly, but it's something like all but Basque and one other (Welsh perhaps?) can be connected to the same Indo-Aryan root.

I also got to know some Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO) buddhists, who take Sanskrit names upon ordination. Sanskrit, being about as close as one can get to the notional proto-Indo-Aryan, re-kindled my interest. For example, the Sanskrit go becomes cu in Old English and finally cow in modern English. Interestingly, just east of the region where Mrs Upton was teaching me Saxon place names, 'cow' is still pronounced something like 'cu' (at least among the older, rural, generation: TV is rapidly homogenizing English pronounciation); there is a village near where my mother now lives called Cowlinge - pronounced cu-linj.

I guess I just love words and their connections. Mine is only an amateur interest though - I am no expert! What got you into it?