*funta doesn't seem to mean exactly 'spring' - it seems to be either
'spring with Roman associations' or 'Roman remains with spring
associations'. Take Havant (Hants) for example: it seems to mean
Hama's *funta, but the main spring is called "Homewell". Havant is on
the Roman road (I think St Faith's church [12th cent?] is built
directly on the Roman road - to provide a firm foundation only a few
metres from the spring line.)
--
John Briggs
Jeremy Harte wrote:
>
> I think I’d agree with all of that - *funta was a loan-word borrowed early
> in the history of OE from Latin-speakers, or from speakers of British who
> themselves had acquired it as a loan-word (could those two options be
> distinguished phonologically?). It was in use in a limited part of the
> country, and it’s quite possible that it had some specific shade of meaning
> which differentiated it from wella. But I haven’t seen any evidence as to
> what that meaning might be. It could be ‘spring with Roman masonry’ but it
> could also be ‘particularly large and impressive spring’ or ‘spring warm
> enough to bathe in’ or ‘spring set in a rocky background with an echo which
> sounds just like the haunted voices of massacred villa-owners’. Loan-words
> acquire a semantic life in their second language unrelated to their use in
> the first one, as any etymology anorak will confirm.
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