3. Words for “Rivers” and “The Ocean” consist of terms for “Water.”
For example: “The Esk” is from Eask (_Irish_), and Esseg (_Dongolan, North Africa_), “Water.” “The Usk” or “Ou-isg,” as the word is pronounced by the Welsh, from Uisge, “Water” (_Irish_), connected with Eask (_Irish_). “The Ayr” is identical with A.r. “A River,” also “To flow” (_Hebrew_), “The Yarrow” with Iaro (_Egyptian_), and the Hebrew words Ee.a.ou.r Ee.a.r (modifications of A.r, _Hebrew_). Some able Celtic scholars have attempted to explain the origin of such names as “Ayr and Yarrow,” which are very common as names of rivers in Celtic countries, by means of a Celtic term which means “Gentle,” an explanation very inapplicable in many instances. The error of these writers arises from the assumption they are prone to adopt, that the Celtic is an unchanged language, the truth being that the changes which it can be shown to have undergone in more recent times, form a distinct ground for the conclusion that, long prior to the earliest period to which our most ancient Celtic specimens can be referred, the Celts must have lost many words which their forefathers brought with them from the East.
In the names above noticed, not only the general features, but the finer shades of inflection of the Oriental words reappear.
Numerous examples may be pointed out, of words applied in some languages to “Water” generally, appropriated exclusively, in others to the “Sea or Ocean.” Thus we have Shui in Chinese, and Su in _Turkish_, “Water.” In the _German_ See, the _Anglo Saxon_ Seo Sae, the _English_ “Sea,” and in other analogous terms to be met with in all the Gothic tongues, we recognize the same term as a word for a “Lake,” or for “The Sea.” Adelung has pointed out the resemblance which in some other instances the Turkish bears to the German. The ancestors of the Turks and Germans, it may be observed, are both traceable to contiguous regions of Northern Asia, the great “High Road of Nations” from China to Europe.
Again, in various dialects of the North American Indians we meet with Oghnacauno, Oneekanoosh, &c. “Water.” In Latin and Greek we find the same term “Ocean-os, Ocean-oio”, &c., applied exclusively to “The Ocean.” (See for other examples Appendix A, p. 77.)