v1.0
Published 01/10/24
brot is cited as a Sutherland Gaelic term for ‘a place where a river runs into the sea’ by Craigie (1894, 162: ‘et sted, hvor en Flod udmunder i Havet’), who derives it from ON brot nt.
So de Vries (1962) and McDonald (2009, 346; 2015, 143).
in the sense ‘surf, breakers’ (‘Brændinger, Bölgebrud paa Banker og Skær’),
Presumably from the senses ‘breaking; fragment’.
as opposed to the sense ‘shallow place or ford in a river (NO
Cf. Zoega 1910: OIce. brot in the sense ‘a shallow place in a river or a firth’.
)’. However, ON brot would be expected to yield SG *brod *[b̥ɾɔd̪̥] rather than brot *[b̥ɾɔʰt̪]. As Craigie notes, the Gaelic word does not appear in dictionaries, but neither does it seem to be attested elsewhere at all, and it is possibly a ghost word arising through transmission error; ?cf. SG bot, bota in such senses as ‘river bank; sandbank; broken land either on the moor or where the sea comes in’, s.v. bot (2.). (For SG brot in the sense ‘cloak, mantel’, s.v. 1brat.)