1909, Willis Linn Jepson,The Trees of California,page13:
The most interesting and striking features of thesilva of California relate to its composition, the geographical distribution of the species and their biological history.
Barreiro, Xavier Varela; Guinovart, Xavier Gómez (2006–2018), “silua”, inCorpus Xelmírez: corpus lingüístico da Galicia medieval [Corpus Xelmírez: linguistic corpus of Medieval Galicia] (in Galician), Santiago de Compostela:Instituto da Lingua Galega
Traditionally derived fromProto-Indo-European*sel-,*swel-(“firewood, wood, beam, board, frame, threshold”), and compared withAncient Greekὕλη(húlē,“wood, timber”) andOld Englishsyl(“sill, threshold, foundation”). However, De Vaan is implicitly skeptical of this derivation, and leaves the origin open.
“silva”, inCharlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879),A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
“silva”, inCharlton T. Lewis (1891),An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
"silva", in Charles du Fresne du Cange’sGlossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
Carl Meißner; Henry William Auden (1894),Latin Phrase-Book[1], London:Macmillan and Co.
wooded hills:montes vestiti silvis
De Vaan, Michiel (2008),Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series; 7), Leiden, Boston: Brill,→ISBN,page564
The/i/ is puzzling. PhilologistLeite de Vasconcelos felt that the word was not a Latinism and conjectured a termspīna *silvea with the same suffix asligneus andpīneus, where the close post-tonic vowel would cause the stressed vowel to rise, as inmarisma andsirgo.[1]
