yDc’s AHD gives the following for brat:
brat[sup]1[/sup]
n.
1. A child, especially a spoiled or ill-mannered one.
2. A child of a career military person.
[hr]
[Possibly from [tt]brat[/tt], coarse garment, from Middle English, from Old English [tt]bratt[/tt] of Celtic origin .]
[hr]
brattish adj.
brattish·ness n.
Of note in the etymology is that "of Celtic origin" is in italics, which tells us that the Old English word [tt]bratt[/tt] means of Celtic origin, and not that the word itself is of Celtic origin. So we are still not sure where the word comes from.
The Online Etymology Dictionary entry differs from the AHD on the ultimate etymology:
brat - c.1505, slang, "beggar’s child," originally northern, midlands and western England dialect "makeshift or ragged garment," probably the same word as O.E. bratt "cloak," from a Celtic source (cf. O.Ir. bratt "cloak, cloth"). The modern meaning is perhaps from notion of "child’s apron." Bratty is first recorded 1961.
This is a more consistent etymology, tracing it back to an Old Irish word (i. e. "a Celtic source"), so it’s possible that some overworked scribe dropped the ball, so to speak, when copying the etymology into the online AHD, sending a pertinent part into the bit bucket. Ergo, "Caveat lector!" ("Let the reader beware!").
In Latin, the Lewis & Short dictionary from the Perseus Project tells us:
bractea (also brattea ), ae, f. [perh. kindr. with brachô, to rattle], a thin plate of metal, gold-leaf (thicker plates of metal are called laminae; cf. Isid. Orig. 16, 18, 2: bractea dicitur tenuissima lamina): aranea bratteaque auri, _ast; Lucr. 4, 729: leni crepitabat brattea vento, Verg. A. 6, 209 : inspice, quam tenuis bractea ligna tegat, Ov. A. A. 3, 232 ; Mart. 8, 33, 6; Plin. 33, 3, 19, § 61; cf. argenteae, id. 37, 7, 31, § 105 .—
B. Poet.: viva, the golden fleece of Spanish sheep, Mart. 9, 62, 4 .—
C. Meton., thin layers of wood, veneers (opp. lamina): ligni, Plin. 16, 43, 84, § 232 .—
II. Trop., show, glitter: eloquentiae, Sol. praef. 2.
Brattia , ae, f., an island of Dalmatia, Plin. 3, 26, 30, § 152.
bratus, i, f., a tree similar to the cypress, Plin. 12, 17, 39, § 78.
So there doesn’t seem to be any help there either, other than eliminating Latin as the source.
I found an interesting paper, ModE girl And Other Terms for ‘Young Female Person’ In English Language History, which also addresses the origins of brat and flicka, the latter being topic of another recent discussion. In the passage quoted below, both bratt and flicka seem to have a parallel etymology, in that a word originally denoting an item of clothing or a piece of cloth is later used to denote a human being.
. . . But in a very detailed examination of the supposed development of ‘apparel’ to ‘human being’ Moerdijk (1994) reaches the verdict that Robinson’s derivation is unwarranted from the semantic point of view.[sup]4[/sup] Since, however, semantic change can lead to rather surprising innovations it would certainly be foolhardy to maintain immediately that Robinson’s etymology is impossible from the point of view of meaning, even if the assumed route may appear rather complicated.[sup]5[/sup] But at least one instance may be mentioned, which seems to have undergone a parallel semantic development. ModE brat is attested from the sixteenth century onwards, and according to the OED the origin of the word is unknown. Phonologically there would be no problem at all to link brat with OE bratt, a hapax legomenon found in the interlinear gloss to Matthew 5.40 in the Lindisfarne Gospels: remitte et pallium is glossed by forlet 7 hrægl 7 hæcla 7 bratt (Skeat 1887: 51) The word is probably borrowed from Old Irish.[sup]6[/sup] In Middle Englisch brat means a piece of clothing. It would seem reasonable to identify the Early Modern English word brat ‘child’ with this term, because otherwise no etymological connection can be proposed for this noun.[sup]7[/sup] A similar example from Swedish is flicka ‘girl’, which goes back to ON flik ‘patch, rag’
(Hellquist 1980). The specialization of meaning from ‘child’ to ‘girl’ is paralleled by OE bearn (now ‘girl’ in northern dialects), OE cild (now ‘girl’ in in southern dialects), ModE baby (which in colloquial, slangy language is used to refer to (young) women[sup]8[/sup] ).
[sup]4[/sup] Moerdijk summed up his discussion as follows: "That his [i.e. Robinson’s] etymology will appear untenable, is an implicit result of my analysis" (Moerdijk 1994: 43). Moerdijk actually bases his discussion on Robinson’s 1967 text and does not seem to have been aware of the reissue (with update) in Robinson 1993. Neither Diensberg (1984) nor Terasawa (1993) are mentioned by Moerdijk.
[sup]5[/sup] A particularly rich overview of past attempts at clarifying the etymology of girl is provided by Liberman 1998. Liberman himself favours a borrowing from Low German: “Girl is LG Gör ‘girl’, with a diminutive suffix, borrowed into English” (Liberman 1998: 160).
[sup]6[/sup] OE bratt was interpreted as a borrowing from Celtic by Förster (1921: 125); but see further Ekwall (1922: 76).
[sup]7[/sup] A further possible parallel can perhaps be recognized in brogue ‘strongly marked provincial accent’, although here the development would seem to be one step more complicated still. The word brogue ‘rough shoe of Ireland and the Scottish highlands’ is likely to be borrowed from Irish bróg. In order to explain the meaning ‘provincial accent’ we may have to assume that the word was used in the sense ‘person wearing a brogue (a rough shoe)’, and by a further metonymy the term for the person was transferred to another characteristic of the person, namely his way of speaking.
[sup]8[/sup] This usage is attested as early as 1915 (cf. OED, s.v. babe).
I guess that’s enough for one post! Don’t forget to click on the link for hapax legomenon in the quote above; I sure had no foggy notion of what it meant until I went looking for the definition!
Regards//Larry, The Brat In The Hat
