dwinan, 'tabescere,' Old Norse dvína, 'to dwindle, pine away,' Sanskrit dhvan, 'to be hidden, to go out or be extinguished,' dhvânta, 'hidden, dark,' and as a neuter noun 'darkness;' possibly also the Greek word θάνατος, 'death.' On the other hand, the Celtic names are not to be severed from, the Welsh word dyn, 'a human being or man in the sense of homo, not of vir, Irish duine of the same meaning, both of which postulate an early form donjos,[1] meaning literally and etymologically a θνητός: to the early Celt, as to the Greek, man was a mortal, as distinguished from the immortal gods and the ancestors who had taken their departure to the Plain of Pleasure in the other world where death was unknown.
A word must now be devoted to the position of the goddess as regards her consort: Cernunnos was the
- ↑ This etymology was suggested to Dr. Stokes, who has approved of it and explained by means of it, in his Celtic Declension, p. 37, the irregularity of an Irish duine making dóini in the plural: the former, according to his rule, comes from an oxytone dunjó-, and the latter from a paroxytone dúnjo-. The Welsh dyn postulates the latter; but we have a trace of the former in a 'dyneᵭ,' from which was sometimes formed a plural 'dyneᵭon,' written dyneton in the Black Bk. (Skene, ij. 29, line 11), and dynedun in the Bk. of Taliessin (Skene, ij. 196, line. 10). The Celtic root being dwan or dvan, the evolution of dóini from it has its parallel in Old Irish cóic, 'five,' from a base corresponding to the Latin quinque. The Welsh dyn is now masculine, and a feminine dynes, 'woman,' has been made for it, but so recently that it is not yet a book-word; but in the Middle Ages dyn was often used in the feminine by the poets, and it occurs of that gender also in old Cornish (see Stokes's Beunans Meriasek, verse 1006): this means that the word was originally, like θνητός, an adjective, donjos, donja, donjon, of three genders. Lastly, we seem to have an element of the same origin in the Dontaurios of a magic spell extant in the Gaulish language: see Stokes's Celt. Decl. p. 78. For a different account of the origin of θάνατος, see Brugmann's Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (Strassburg, 1886), i. §§ 236, 429b, 1.
