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Further debate on Fathom
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On a previous webpage, I made a comment about the origin of the word fathom. I have been challenged about this by Edward Welbourne, and his arguement is so interesting that I give it in full below.
I should tell you that the scandinavian nations all have
archaic units of essentially the same name: Swedish famn, Danish and
Norse favn. The scandinavian languages also have a suitably cognate
"embrace" verb to match famn/favn - for example, my Norwegian
dictionary gives me the verb omfavne and noun omfavnelse (om = about;
-e to -else is a standard nouning of a verb) - which is what my Norse
friends clearly believe favn to mean; so we can as readily credit the
fathom's name to vikings - who, note, are well established as having
made a significant contribution to British maritime culture.
The French also used to have a unit called the "pied" (i.e. foot,
short for "pied de roi") that's 6.5% bigger than the modern foot; and
they had a matching "toise" of 6 "pied".
The assorted fathoms are all 3 ells (Swedish aln, Danish and Norse
alen), an ell is two feet (Swedish and Norse fot, Danish fod) and a
foot is twelve inches (Swedish tum, Danish tomme, Norse tom - these
words all mean thumb). We thus have a whole family. Each family has the same ratios, but there are minor
divergences as to the exact value of the units: relative to the
English unit, Danish and Norse are about 3% higher, Swedish is about
3% lower. (The Swedish foot thus works out at a quite close
approximation to the "light nano-second".)
So I believe it's fair to say that all of these units are ancient;
it's possible they date from, say, the Hanseatic league propagating a
standard set of units, but they may equally date back to the point of
linguistic divergence of the germanic and scandic tribes - most of two
millennia, I think.
Edward Welbourne
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