30 Rhodora [FEBRUARY 
as to the wide-spread practice of preparing a beverage from the fruit 
of this plant is not without interest, but neither the name nor the prac- 
tice, for either of which Fernald's earliest literary testimony is from the 
close of the 16th century, has any necessary application to the time or 
place of the literary monuments commemorating the Norse discovery 
of America. Fernald reasons as a botanist: if the most learned 
botanists of the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries 
confused the currant or the mountain-cranberry with the southern 
European grape, one could not expect that they were distinguished 
by anyone in northern Europe at an earlier period. That linguistic 
usage bears abundant testimony to the association (if not confusion) 
of the 3 kinds of plants with one another is an indubitable fact. But 
Fernald's attitude towards the facts of linguistic history seems uncon- 
sciously to coincide with that of a bygone school of philologists who 
regarded languages as undergoing a constant process of deterioration: 
i. e., he looks upon everything found in a relatively modern period as 
a survival from a more general condition of things in a linguistically 
richer past. As a matter of fact the development is more complex and 
the beginning must be considered as well as the end. The word wine 
and all its northern European kin are loan-words directly or indirectly 
from the Latin vinum (Vulgar Latin also vinus), the word with the 
things for which it stands becoming known to the Germanic peoples 
from about the beginning of the Christian era, to the most northerly 
ones of course relatively later. That as a loan-word it first applied 
to the foreign grape and its products is incontestable. "The earliest 
record we have of the combination wine-berry is in the Gothic of the 
Bible-translation accredited to Bishop Ulfilas (Wulfila) of the 4th 
century, the oldest manuscripts of which date from the 5th and 6th 
centuries. It occurs here as weinabasi (Mat. vii, 16; Lu. vi, 44) trans- 
lating the Greek oraguM. In the related Old Germanic languages 
it was also found: in Old Saxon and Old High German winberi, Old 
English winberie (berige), Old Norse vinber, everywhere with the mean- 
ing grape, a meaning preserved in present German Weinbeere and 
generally in the Scandinavian languages. The transfer of the word 
to currant has become thoroughly established only in modern Swedish, 
1 Cf. Walde, Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd ed., 839. 1910; Falk & 
Torp, Norwegisch-dünisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, 1381. 1911; Kluge, 
Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 7th ed., 487. 1910; Hoops, 
Waldbüume und Kulturpflanzen im germanischen Altertum, 558fT. 1905; with the 
literature there cited. 
