Re: English oddities

At 1:23 am +0000 11/7/00, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
>>From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
>>Subject: Re: English oddities
>>Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 16:56:23 -0400
>>
>>Mangiat wrote:
>>
>> > I was wondering in the last days where the word 'TIME' is from.
>>
>>It's a borrowing from Old Norse.  There are many such words that have
>>been borrowed and then semantically differentiated from their native
>>counterparts: time and tide, skirt and shirt, etc.
>
>Wait a minit! 'Time' and 'tide' both exist in Old Norse ("ti'mi" and
>"ti'd");
..and tíma and tíd both existed in Old English   :)

> how can English 'tide' then be the "native" counterpart of foreign
>'time'?
You're right - it can't.

>Where does this 'time' come from? Just Old Norse? Is it a modified form of
>'tide'?
I think Lars has the answer:
At 9:35 pm +0200 10/7/00, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
[....]
>According to my diccy, time/tide is an old doublet in Germanic. Danish
>has tid = E. time, Da. time = E. hour.
>
>'Replace' is probably the wrong word --- the manings of the two words
>just specialized in different ways in the different languages.
Yep.

It was interesting to see what Oskar said in his first mail:
At 1:10 am +0000 11/7/00, Oskar Gudlaugsson wrote:
[....]
>Icelandic also has "ti'mi" ['thi:mI] for the same meaning. And "ti'd" as an
>older word, now being more like 'season'.
And 'tide' in English had also the meaning of 'season' rather than time in
general - tho now, of course, it's normally used of the daily ebb & flow of
the sea.  But the older meaning is still retained in words like
'Eastertide', 'Christmastide', 'Lammastide' and..

At 5:59 pm +0200 10/7/00, Mangiat wrote:
Anyway it seems once upon a time it meant 'time'
>as well, exemples are 'noontide' or 'yuletide', quite obsolete, I know,
No - not quite obsolete.  The words are still occasionally used,
particularly 'Yuletide'.  They are archaic and obsolescent, maybe, but they
refuse to die  :)

Ray.



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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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