_Welsh Words for Water_ (Vol. iii., p. 30.).--
"It is quite surprising," says Sharon Turner (_Trans. of the Royal
Society of Literature_, vol. i. pt. i. p. 97.), "to observe that, in
all the four quarters of the world, many nations signify this liquid by
a vocable of one or more syllables, from the letter M."
He mentions the Hebrew word for it, _mim_; in Africa he finds twenty-eight
examples, in Asia sixteen, in South America five, in North America three,
in Europe three; and elsewhere, in Canary Islands one, in New Zealand one.
He adds--
"We trace the same radical in the Welsh _more_, the sea, and in the
Latin _mare, humor, humidus._[27]
"All these people cannot be supposed to have derived their sound from
each other. It must have descended to them from some primitive source,
common to all."
From the expression used by J. W. H., "the connexion of the Welsh _dwr_
with the Greek [Greek: hudor] is remarkable," he appears not to have known
that Vezron found so many resemblances in the Doric or Laconic dialect, and
the Celtic, that he thereupon raised the theory that the Lacedaemonians and
the Celts were of the same--the Titanic--stock.