Talk:rót
Old Irish etymology[edit]
Alexander MacBain is an outdated and unreliable source for etymology. Here are some recent comments by David Stifter (Professor of Early Irish at Maynooth University) on this etymology. Yes, this is anecdotal, but it should appear in a printed source soon.
Just to add diachronic depth to what @FrankmcnallyIT says in his article, it appears that the word was disyllabic in Old Irish, i.e. nom. sg. roüt = phonetic [ro.ud], which lends credence to Cormac ua Cuilennáin's explanation as a compound *ro-ṡét "great path" < *φro-sentu-.
Being quoted in the early 9th century Sanas Cormaic from an apparently archaic law-text, the word is much too early to be credible as a loan from English (apart from the massive formal divergence). Although we do find early loans from English very occasionally, it is not a regular source for borrowings in the Old Irish period. In fact, most alleged examples in @eDIL_Dictionary can be explained differently. (I will say a bit about this in my forthcoming edition of Comrac Líadaine ⁊ Cuirithir, which I hope will be finished any day now.)
(Twitter)
There may well be other sources for this derivation, but Old Irish etymologies often end up spread across many random journal articles, rather than appearing in a coherent form in one place. ☸ Moilleadóir ☎ 05:32, 29 November 2023 (UTC)