A nadder or an adder

I finally got a photo of an adder, Vipera berus, at RSPB Minsmere. It slithered across the footpath as we headed for one of the hides on our mid-April visit, and Mrs Sciencebase almost trod on it. Thankfully, she didn’t, the Common European Adder (or Viper) is venomous. Not poisonous note, venomous. If it bites you, you may well succumb to its venom. It is probably quite edible, rather than being poisonous. Common Adder, Vipera berus Anyway, there’s another linguistic point to be made about an adder. The term is an example of a “faulty separation”. As you will note in the Etymology Online site and various other sources, the name for this species of snake in Middle English was naddre. This goes back via a circuitous route to the proto-Indo-European, PIE, root *netr- meaning snake. However, at some point in the 14th to 16th centuries, a nadder became an adder, that initial n merged with the indefinite article a to become the same but commonly used when the initial letter is a vowel…