Etymology

Rosie and I chatted a few weeks ago about 'Etymology' - the study of the origin of words - and the idea that  words, when traced back,  have their roots in a physical action. Its a very interesting idea that the sources of words may be non-verbal, and movement or gesture or whatever came before language. As we will be working so closely with text during the project, we talked about using this to explore choreography.
It adds yet another interesting layer to the work - exploring the roots of language is definately something I would like to look further into.
After our conversation I decided to do some research into etymology of the Welsh language. An hour or so on Google one Saturday night (yes, this is how I spend my weekends!) offered tons of literature and websites on the English language but not alot on the Welsh language. One colleague told me that he used to have a book on the etymology of Welsh from Pembrokeshire. I could suddenly imagine all of this getting very complicated knowing that there are so many regional forms of the Welsh language - how on earth am I going to tackle this??!!
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was put in contact with a fantastic person - Marged Haycock - who is a professor of Welsh at Aberystwyth University. I emailed her and she emailed me straight back with a list of books that she felt would be of use to me Brilliant!! One to definately go with is 'Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru' (University Dictionary of Wales) which is 4 volumes of the definition and etymology of probably every word in the Welsh language. At £350 a volume, it may be a case of beg, steal and borrow at the moment (well hopefully just borrow!). But at least I have a direction to follow.
Out of interest I looked at an online etymological dictionary. Not great and seems to have every language except Welsh but was still quite interesting to explore. I looked up some words that appear quite regularly in the songs I have been working with. One that was very interesting was that in the 16C, the English word for 'window' was 'fenester.' The Welsh word for window is 'ffenest.' A reminder of which language came first....?! :)