204 Edington or Yatton the Ethandun of Alfred’s Victory? 
lings of the same word, and Etton a shortened form of it. Ea-ton, 
with one ¢, would mean a village on a running stream, a name that 
would not have been given to Yatton, while the meaning of ‘ea’ 
was still known, but might easily enough have been corrupted from 
it in later times. But Eatton could scarcely be derived from A‘pan, 
for the «2 has no more tendency to become ea, than to become ya, 
and there is the same anomaly as in the case of Yatton, the change 
ofa p toat. 
With Slaughterford, as there is no mention of it in the ancient 
chronicles, we have in this present enquiry nothing todo. There 
may have been a battle with the Danes there, but we have no 
evidence that it was Alfred’s battle of Epandun. 
Before concluding this paper, I beg to be allowed to say a few 
words upon etymological reasoning generally. 
There is nothing more illusory than listening to vague resemblance 
of sound in words, and concluding upon their mutual connexion 
without regard to the laws which govern the changes of a language 
as regularly as the declension and conjugation of nouns and verbs. 
Those who are familiar with any local dialect will anticipate how 
a peasant will pronounce any word that is given to him; how surely 
in Wiltshire he will change s to s, and f to 2, and will utter his 
a’s broadly, and give a coarse sound to his /’s and 7’s after a vowel. 
The changes effected in our language since the Conquest have fol- 
lowed rules quite as constant, except perhaps in the case of gh, 
with which, since we lost its sound, we seem not to know what to 
do. Where a foreign nation learns a new language, and learns it 
imperfectly, there is no anticipating how capriciously words may 
be altered, but the devolopment of a language in its native country, 
and by the race to which it belongs, is not a matter of chance. 
And here I would explain what, for the sake of the argument, 
it was necessary to state broadly above in the question of Iglea and 
Highley, that an initial 4 has never been capriciously adopted or 
suppressed in synonymous words in any of the Germanic languages. 
The irregularity noticeable in the pronouns of the third person 
might seem to contradict this statement, for our word 7¢ is Ait in 
Anglo-Saxon, het in Dutch, es in German, and it, {or here and 
