Post by Franz GnaedingerPost by Franz GnaedingerLooking for a possible parallel in Central Switzerland I found the field names
bruchi and bröchi, and the family name Bruchi (no longer in use) wherefrom
the younger Bruhin (still fairly widespread), meaning uncertain, perhaps
referring to agriculture. My ad hoc impression was that the field names refer
to small pieces of land 'broken off' a large expanse owned by a rich farmer.
On the small fragment (akin to break and broken) a poor farmer family may
have been allowed to build a modest house, maintain a garden for growing
vegetables, a few fruit tree, hold chickens, a couple of goats and maybe swine,
obliged to pay tributes to the landlord, and work for him part of the time.
The family name Bruchi then Bruhin would have come from that position. Brogan
as family name in the Auvergne and Haute-Loire could have had the same origin.
If the name comes from Irish and Scottish, it means shoe, diminutive of brogue, but are there people named Shoe? Shoemaker, Schuhmacher, that family name
exists. In any case, brogan has something to do with break broken, one way
or another. Will have to look up the etymology of the Latin word for trousers.
Brogan derives from LAtin bracae 'trousers'. Google for bracae in the sector
Images and you find various Roman trousers, among them one in the form of
leggins made of leather, trousers and fottwear in one piece, also here
http://classicsalaromana.blogspot.ch/2014/01/com-anaven-vestis-els-romans.html
So shoes would originally have been 'broken off' from the trousers, but how
bracae is correlated with break broken I will have to find out. Nobody said
etymology was easy.
Irish brogan is the diminutive of brog 'shoe' and is a form of brogue that
goes back to Latin bracae 'trousers'. Apparently shoes had once been seen
as part of bracae 'trousers', really hanging together in Roman leather
leggins. The etymology of Latin bracae might become simple in the light of
Magdalenian BRI meaning fertile. Fertility and breaking are linked in a
certain way. Break a twig from a tree, plant it, and if you are lucky it grows
into another tree (Norman soil is so fertile that people said jokingly: plant
a pencil and it grows). BRI is also present in branching, one branch becoming
two branches, one twig a pair of twigs. Increasing numbers are a simple form
of fertility: One becomes Two, then Three, then Many. In that numerical sense
also fragment is a derivative of BRI, which is also present in French briser
'break'. A robe is one single piece of cloth, and so is bracae 'trousers',
but they branch into a pair of tubes, each covering one leg, therefore the
plural both in bracae and in trousers (the latter plural irritated me when
in school). The words tentatively interpreted so far would be akin to break
in one way or another. A French brogan as reason to close a road can hardly
bee a shoe (unless the Hollywood director who invented the killer tomato
spent a holiday in the Auvergne and planned a sequel he called Brogan the
killer shoe), so I stick to my assumption that it may be a boulder broken
off from a rocky slope and fallen on a road where it blocks the traffic -
broken Brocken brogan. (We have a Frenchman among us. He could write a couriel
to a tourist office in the Haute-Loire and ask for the meaning of brocan in
the local French usage.)