Burglar?? How do you get from a mountain to a thief?!?

There is always one that flummoxes me.

There are some unverified 'theories' about this.
* Dwarfs and goblins of old used to dig deep under mountains and hills and rob or 'burglar' the noble minerals, carrying them off to their boroughs. They were at first called 'bergers', changed to burglars.
* The old chieftains used to have themselves buried with all their treasures under a mound, which word even being of obscure origin is sort of a mountain.
Those mounds were burglared all the time, cause everybody knew the story.
From: The Mountain and the Thief.

Grab you an AHD4 and browse through the IE roots. You'll find all sorts of interesting weirdosities. Stalwart, weird, vertebra, wrath, and rhapsody all come from the same PIE root.

How do you get from a mountain to a thief?!?

Because of iron age hill forts becoming boroughs. The word burglar ...

[While editing this to fix the HTML problem, I lost most of the post. Ah, well, maybe later I can fix it ...]

Before getting into the commute, here's the short version. The word burglar is from a Medieval Latin word burgulator. The first part of which is from Old English burh 'castle; borough'. (The OED thinks it may be a half loan translation of Old English burhbrece 'breaking into a castle'. More later.

[Trying to recreate the post with addenda.]

What I was trying to say earlier, which got lost in a flurry of octothorpes and digits, was that it seemed a natural progression to me from 'high place' > 'mountain' > 'hill fort' > 'castle' > 'city'. Then a burglar is somebody who breaks into a castle. Another nice touch is that, the verb that the Anglo-Latin noun burgulator comes from exists in a 13th century document: burgulare 'to burgle'. (Though the modern burgle is a back-formation of burglar.) So, the burg of burglar seems connected to Berg 'mountain' and Burg 'castle' of German, but the big question mark has got that l in its sights. Whence and whither?

Latin burgus 'castle' and Greek πυργος (purgos) 'castle' are borrowings from a Germanic language. Cf. Gothic baurgs. And many of the etymologists I consulting pointed out that Urartian (an agglutinative non-Semitic, non-Indo-European language of ancient Anatolia) has burgana 'palace'.

At this point, in the old and lost post, I mentioned that it's intriguing that Russian has гора (gora) 'mountain' and город( gorod) 'city', though these words are from different roots.

Yes, I know you would know the best way from hill to borough, but you did not bring in the thief in connection to.I try to read your post carefully, but get nervous/ confused from all the numbers and signs.
Could you edit it through this UBBC-HTML thing? If you please?

Does Devil's Tower in Wyoming qualify as inselberg?
Has lots of legends surrounding it, and is quite a site.

That the one from Close Encounters? link

I think Devil's Tower is a little bit too imposing to be classed an inselberg (or, more commonly in the U.S., monadnock). link
-joe (unprepossessing) friday

Bold Faldage's

Which still leaves open the question, "Whence the L?"

COED says this:
burglar
". noun a person who commits burglary.
— ORIGIN from Old French burgier ‘pillage’."
It is a connection between borough and burglar, both through Old English and Old french.From bhergh to borough to burglar. Were we not trying to find where the thief came into the story? Wasn't that Zed's question?

Devil's mountain maybe isn't smooth enough to be a monadnock.
Imposing, all mountains are imposing.

> burgier

somebody probably mis-read the "i" as an "l".

Augmented my much edited posting above. From the OED1: "The related burglary is in legal A[nglo]F[rench] burlarie in Anglo-Latin burgaria, burgeria (early 13 c.), for which burglaria is found in the 16th c. The origin of the intrusive l in burglator, burglaria, and the corresponding Eng. forms is not clear; but the notion of Lambarde (1581) and later writers that the ending -lar represents AF ler-s, laroun (:- L. latro, latronem) thief, is contrary to the evidence." It seems to me from the French and Latin forms that the l came about from dissimilation (link).

Really interesting lines of developement. Showing that it counts for most parts of the world that people chose the high places to build their fortresses. And those who ended up in the swamps made their modest inselbergs by elevating the earth by hand.
link
I've read both posts and I understand 98 % of it.
( you say burglator did not lead to ladro.)

you say burglator did not lead to ladro

The editor in the OED1 was saying that the l in burgaltor was not related to the l in Latin latro. But Italian ladro did come from the Latin word.

I can't remember the term for a crater-like hole in the ground which is the product of lava flowing around a hill (a sand hill, in the case of the hole I'm thinking of), which the wind then empties, leaving the hole. They look like craters but they're seldom as regularly round. There's a name for such, but I'm hanged if I can remember it or find it.

Anyone?

Thanks.

I don't remember learning about such a phenomenon, Albinoni, but I only took a couple of geology courses. You might try either a geology dictionary (Google gives several) or possibly an online encyclopedia about effects of lava.