The word island was kind of a mess throughout history. The first dated attestation of it was back in the year 888, when it was spelled iland. Since then, it was also written as igland, ealond, yllonde, ylande, iegland, illond, yslelond, yle londe, and ilond. Before the muddled days of Middle and Old English, it's reconstructed to Proto-Germanic awjolanda, which could mean "meadow" in addition to "island" and traces to a combination of Proto-Indo-European hekeh, meaning "water", and lend, "land". You'll notice that none of those root words and most of the spellings I listed earlier don't have an s in them, but the modern term does. That's because of confusion with the word isle, which is an entirely unrelated word coming from the Latin word insula (you can see the conflation in yselond from before), which is pretty neat.
1 Comment
Nathan
10/18/2019 11:14:41 pm
I need a follow up for insula
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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