On Monday, April 15, 2002, at 02:50 AM, Joern Eyrich wrote:

http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=bylaws seems to support this analysis

goran.hultgren@bluefish.se wrote:

...

I have (of course) been reading your discussions about how to setup SqF and the word "bylaws" got my attention. I have never heard/seen it before but I guessed it must come from the nordic languages.

Swedish:

by = village lag = law

And there is actually a word "byalag" in Swedish. (all this seems to exist similarly in Norwegian)

So it seems to mean "village law". After checking with Merriam-Webster I conclude my guess was semi-correct, "bylaw" seems to indeed stem from the scandinavian word "byalag". But there is more to learn here.

In Swedish the word "lag" both means "law" and "team"/"group of people". I would guess (yes, a guess - I may be wrong) that the meaning of the word "lag" (as in "law") evolved from "byalag", because it seems to me that "byalag" in the beginning referred to a "team of men from the village" that got together when something needed to be done that required cooperation - like putting a roof on a house or something.

Bylaw, byrlaw, and burlaw are all english variants from the Old Norse -per Webster's unabridged . Interestingly 'law' comes to English from Ancient Scandinavian via Old Scandinavian and is akin to the Old Norse -same source. (Hmm, I'd have thought Old Norse a subset of Old Scandinavian.) By this it would seem that the roots of 'law' predate the roots of bylaw. Goran's intriguing narrative does reflect the closeness of the two words and nicely portrays their nature (for this non-Scandinavian.)

...

It wouldn't surprise me if the "will" of this team more and more turned into "rules" of the village. So perhaps that is how the word lag (as in "law") came about.

Ok, now you can all smack me in the head and explain to me that it actually came from Swahili or something. :-)

Wait a sec. Maybe that AS and OS really stand for Ancient Swahili and Old Swahili ;-)