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THEORY: auch & augere

From:BP Jonsson <bpj@...>
Date:Thursday, March 23, 2000, 16:39
At 18:03 22.3.2000 -0600, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > > > It seems to me that German auch would be from PIE *auk, whereas Latin > > augere would be from *aug; unless perhaps the ch in <auch> comes from the > > affricate shift in German, but I've never heard of /k/ undergoing that > > shift in the standard dialect (/p/ > /pf/; /t/ > /ts/; but not /k/ > /kx/). > >Not really. According to my dictionary of IE roots, Latin "augere" comes from >PIE *aug- "to increase", while German <auch> and English <eke> both come >from PIE *au-ge- (> Germanic *au-ke-) and is not a root, but a pronominal >used more or less as a base on which to append suffixes. High German did >indeed have that soundshift you mention, but /kx/ later simplified to /x/, >just as >many of the earlier /x/s later simplified to /h/.
It is a matter of debate whether OE _éc_ and _éacan_, and their Scandinavian cognates _auk_ (later _ok_, still later _og_ or _auch_) and _auka_ are ultimately unrelated, but a coalescence in sound definitely made people feel that they were associated. In the Scandinavian medieval laws there are plenty of puns/mnemonics on the pattern that "X _ok_ Y makes good/bad/luck/misfortune/injury/redress _auka_. Perhaps the safest thing is to say that reflexes of *aug- and *au+ge have become formally and semantically mixed up in Germanic! Gothic still distinguished _auh_ and _auk_, though! /BP "Doubt grows with knowledge" -Goethe