ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (07/18/85)
>>How about the word gift, which in German means poison. > >Even better, in Swedish, "gift" as a noun means "poison," as >an adjective, "married." According to the OED, these words really ARE all cognate: AS gift /yift/ F payment for wife, N pl=giftu wedding OFris jeft F gift Dutch gift F gift, gif(t) N poison OHG gift F/N gift/poison => German Gift N poison ONorse gi[pf]t F gift, pl=gi[pf]tar wedding Goth -gifts (suffix) These derive from Proto-Teutonic *ghiftiz(F), *ghifti(N). There was also another Teutonic word for `gift', deriving from *ghebhO(F): AS giefu /yevu/ F (not in Modern English) OSaxon geba F => Dutch gev(e) OHG geba F => German Gabe F ONorse gjof F Goth giba /giva/ F Both are almost certainly related to the verb `give'. English {give,gift} display clear Viking influence, otherwise they would begin y- instead of g- today. `Gift' seems to correspond to `give' as `draft/draught' to `draw', by the addition of a dental suffix to a stem at an early stage in proto- teutonic. This suffix is probably related to our participial -ed and perhaps also to a similar Latin -t-. Note that in this case, we are not really dealing with past participles, since {give, draw} have `strong' participles {given, drawn}. Since there were two words for gift, the stem *ghifti- apparently developed wildly specialized meanings {note that draft/draught also has many meanings}, distinguished from each other by gender and number: Feminine: `what one gives upon marriage' => `payment for wife' Neuter: `what one gives to cause sickness/death' => `poison' Plural: `many things given when somebody marries' => `wedding' As to the Swedish adjectival meaning `married', it seems likely that this is simply a modern past (passive) participle that has come to have the meaning `given in marriage'; the Scandinavian languages have generalized the old dental suffix -{d,t} to both strong and weak verbs, unlike English and German. -michael
aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer) (07/20/85)
In article <402@spar.UUCP> ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) writes: >>>How about the word gift, which in German means poison. >> >>Even better, in Swedish, "gift" as a noun means "poison," as >>an adjective, "married." > > According to the OED, these words really ARE all cognate. > ... > Since there were two words for gift, the stem *ghifti- apparently > developed wildly specialized meanings {note that draft/draught also has > many meanings}, distinguished from each other by gender and number: > > Feminine: `what one gives upon marriage' => `payment for wife' > Neuter: `what one gives to cause sickness/death' => `poison' > Plural: `many things given when somebody marries' => `wedding' > I do not really agree with this latter section. Gift meaning poison is in all germanic languages a loan from German, and in OHG it is a learned translation loan from Greek/Latin dosis. (A euphemism just like poison itself, derived from Latin potio (potion).) This meaning was not distinguished from the neutral one by gender or number: in old german one has the neuter sg. Gift `gift, transfer, poison', and in old icelandic one has the feminines gipt, gipta, gipting `gift, good luck, marriage' (all singular). In other words: there was no synchronic variation of gender but a diachronic variation; I don't know why the originally feminine word became neuter (also Latin dos and Greek dosis are feminines) but both before and after the change the gender was independent of the meaning.