THEORY: auch & augere

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