Talk:quercus

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)Reply

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 Proto-Brythonic *gwɨð for some of what might have contributed to the "cuez" part. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:20, 14 April 2021 (UTC)Reply