Klein wins

[lethargic_man]

My Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, and Collins Concise dictionary all merely list "bitumen" as having derived from Latin bitūmen. Rather to my surprise, I was able to get some more detail from Klein's Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (whilst looking up בֶּטוֹן beton, "concrete", which turns out to derive, via French, from this word):

L. bitūmen (= mineral pitch), an Osco-Umbrian loan word (the genuine Latin form form would have been *vetūmen, from *gwetūmen, of Celtic origin.

Cool, eh?

(Still doesn't tell me where *gwetūmen came from, though: it looks too long to simply be a single term meaning "bitumen, pitch". What do the individual parts of it mean?)

Comments

[grumpyolddog.livejournal.com]

I note that is says "of celtic origin" rather "a celtic word". In P-Celtic languages such as Breton and Welsh, the syllable "Gwet" usually means "solid" or "long lasting" and can be used as "rock".

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Mmm, interesting. Though the modern Celtic languages are reasonably both worn down and changed compared to two thousand years ago^*, that might or might not be indicative of anything.

How's your Old Celtic? ;^b

* Okay, I don't know much about the Celtic languages; but going on the likes of the Old Celtic name Caratacos becoming "Caradog" in modern Welsh, or "Prydain" and "Cruithne" sharing the same source (the latter, of course, in Q-Celtic), etc...

[grumpyolddog.livejournal.com]

It's worth bearing in mind that the old celtic languages probably weren't as different as we can be led to believe them to be. After all, nobody translates Ogham and what written evidence we have is usually transliterated by confused Romans.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's more the other way around: (reconstructed) Old Celtic looks quite like Latin to me—there's lots of elements I can recognise in names like Cunobelinus (hound of Belinus, cf. Latin canis) or Dumnorix (cf. rix with Latin rex, "king"); but when I look at modern Celtic languages, I can rarely make head or tail of them.

(As for Ogham, I get the impression that the orthography used in Ogham lagged several centuries behind the spoken languages, in much the way that written present-day English represents (in features like "gh" in "brought"—or "ea" in "features"); and that when people started using the Latin alphabet in preference to Ogham, the orthography leapt forward several centuries as a result.)