Note 42 — Chapter VII · Triumphs of the Water-world
Reading edition
Why our dictionary makers have taken into their heads to treat it as Tamĕsis I know not. The Welsh is Tafwys with a diphthong regularly representing an earlier long e or ei in the second syllable. There is, as far as I know, no reason to suppose Tafwys an invention, rather than a genuine vocable of the same origin as the name of the Glamorganshire river Taff, in Welsh Taf, which is also the name of the river emptying itself at Laugharne, in Carmarthenshire. Tafwys, however, does not appear to occur in any old Welsh document; but no such weakness attaches to the testimony of the French Tamise, which could hardly come from Tamĕsis: compare also the place-name Tamise near the Scheldt in East Flanders; this, however, may be of a wholly different origin. ↑