just saw Scots word Shiggle, but reference said circa 1915. May be from English Jiggle, circa 1800, derived from jig, circa 1600.
Or maybe the all come from Welsh Siglo, used in 1346 and probably earlier.
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“To” is very common in Bristol. I’m not sure, but I would have said only in SE Wales? Possible Cymraeg equivalent might be “at”? which is also used in NE England. He is at the doctors (rather than “in”). Also staying at for living in [name of town].
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Interesting - at and to, do seem to be linked and a common thing in many languages by the sounds of it.
Looked up “at” in Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru and it went back to add and aed, with 9th century references and suggesting brythonic and Indo-European root “add”.
A search of the English at showed this:
“Old English æt, from Proto-Germanic *at (source also of Old Norse, Gothic at, Old Frisian et, Old High German az), from PIE root *ad- “to, near, at.” Lost in German and Dutch, which use their equivalent of to; in Scandinavian, however, to has been lost and at fills its place.”
Sounds like they come from the same root and can split to" at" or “to”. Also in Welsh, you can have both together sometimes with"ato".
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There are place-names in Old English that always seem to be given with either an ‘at’ or a ‘to’ as part of the name, and I’m not aware that there’s a great deal of difference between them: Basing is æt Basengum, while Reading is to Readingum.
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even in the romance languages. ask a French person who didn’t know any English to say “at” and they would probably say “a” which is pretty much the French equivalent of at, ditto Italian.
There are alternative ways to say to and and at in lots of languages but there’s something about it that seems to have stood the test of time.
The Welsh “at” predates English, which for something shared with so many languages generally points to either Latin, Greek or an earlier very basic common root.
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Yeah, it’s Proto-Indo-European, which means that not only was ‘at’ a Germanic word before the Anglo-Saxons ever arrived in these islands, ‘ad’ was also a Celtic word before the British arrived here, too 
Interestingly, though, the only forms quoted in Wiktionary are Celtic, Germanic, and Italic, suggesting that it might not be shared throughout the oldest layer of PIE vocabulary.
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Help! [quote=“RichardBuck, post:66, topic:9914”]
‘ad’ was also a Celtic word before the British arrived here
[/quote]
Do you mean you agree with those who say the first post-ice age folk here were not Celtic, which is not impossible but would need a bit of proving in terms of what they spoke.
I have often wondered about the Atlantican idea. Sea traders along the west coast of Europe. The known oldest languages of the west coast are Celtic and Basque I suppose and we know where the Celtic languages were and are, but was Basque or something similar ever more widespread? Was it always confined to the areas we now know or did it retreat to them?
I have seen etymologies of old Basque words and have played around with ideas linking place names and geographical names, some way north and south of the Basque areas and its something that I’m a bit curious about.
Hmmm… The consensus position would be that the first post-Ice Age people would be much earlier than the postulated date for Proto Indo-European. I’m not at all familiar with the relevant British archaeology, and you may well be, but I have read a lot on Indo-European and I can imagine that positing such a long history would require you to do a lot of explaining elsewhere.
But anyway – it doesn’t really matter: the Celtic languages as a group are definitely related to other Indo-European languages, so I think it would presumably follow even if they arrived here straight after the last Ice Age that they did so carrying with them the word ‘ad’, or something like it, given that it also exists in Italic and Germanic.
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