lagan

[prettygoodword]

lagan (LAG-uhn) - n., anything sunk in the sea with a buoy attached so that it can be recovered.


As opposed to something floating, in which case it would be either flotsam, which fell off the ship when it was wrecked, or jetsam, which was thrown off, usually to lighten it in a crisis. Exactly which matters, because this affects who has salvage rights -- because the buoy shows intent to recover, lagan still belongs to original carrier. If it's on the bottom without a buoy, it's derelict. Lagan (also sometimes spelled ligan) first shows up around 1530, borrowed either from Middle French lagan or its source, Medieval Latin laganum, debris washed up from the sea, possibly of Germanic origin.

---L.

Comments

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Um, sorry to keep piping up with OED, but these are interesting words. In this case I could've sworn I'd seen lagan mentioned re: wreck, which wouldn't be true were it really only 1530, and indeed OED2 adduces an English charter in Latin ca. 1200, which has "De ewagio de wrec et lagan."

(Amusingly probably only to me, OED2 s.v. wreck n.1. gives a longer bit from the same charter: "De ewagio de wrec et lagan et de omnibus aliis consuetudinibus.")

Incidentally, now I'm puzzled anent your source(s), since 1200 is contemporaneous with Old French. I mean, we have hardly any written OF before 1200 anyway; isn't MF from C14 or so?

[prettygoodword.livejournal.com]

Some dictionaries did say < OF instead of < MF, but since the only dates I was seeing were from the 1500s (or in one case, later), I went with Middle in the post. That 1200 charter is interesting, to say the least.

I'm more than a little vague on when is said to OF shade into MF ...

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

That charter is sort of vital, IMO, because it'd be weird for English to begin borrowing such a concept from French during C16. Scottish English, perhaps, but not English English. But before ~1360, French makes perfect sense. There were a bunch of attempts to codify what the crown got to slice off between Richard I (r. 1189-1199) and Edward I (r. 1272-1307), which lead to little legal-term glossaries in some MSS containing the major charter sequence (some of which also contain my pet text); .

The French thing is tricky because a few words adduced as "from OF" or even MF existed only in insular French usage--French as spoken in England by multinational magnates and their households, partly. French lit didn't do epics (AFAweK) till Chanson de Roland, frex, which seems to have been produced first in England. So "lagan" may not even be borrowed, only derived, if that makes sense, which is why my interest was piqued....

gosh. I put "ewagio" into a web search--"ewage" is straight-up eau + -age, waterage. Here's a date for that charter bit: prepend books dot google dot com and a slash to books?id=6y8a-rOm7D0C&lpg=PA188&ots=5UHnpLnBr1&dq=ewagio&pg=PA188#v=onepage&q=ewagio&f=false because of LJ's linkblock. And here is the charter itself in an untrustworthy old edition: books?id=gkdPAAAAcAAJ&lpg=PA179&ots=OExcsGPeN1&dq=ewagio&pg=PA179#v=onepage&q=ewagio&f=false