In the recent talk of rare canalia we have a first sighting of "windless" with an attempted plural of "windlii".
Well this (pace Mr Stott) might be the emergence of a 6th or even 7th declension based on a snippet of Virgil in his little known footnote to the Georgics book IV "De classibus canalibus" where he describes the early Roman canal building of the fosdyke (Sp?) near Lindum Coloniae new town and in particular the peculiar pieces of ironwork required to work the early locks. Personally I think it's a corruption of the simple masculine 2nd declension noun "Vindlus -i" - a "winder" obviously a Germanic loan word with the "ndl" intervocalic group often seen in early Old Prussian/Yiddish texts. -- ------------------------------------ Dave J In Springlike Extremadura -----------------------------------
