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Re: English oddities

From:Oskar Gudlaugsson <hr_oskar@...>
Date:Tuesday, July 11, 2000, 1:10
>From: Mangiat <mangiat@...> >Subject: English oddities >Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 17:59:14 +0200
>I was wondering in the last days where the word 'TIME' is from. AFAIR there >isn't any other Germanic lng. which has an -M in that position. German >itself has ZEIT, Dutch 'TIJD' (not sure of it - it might be TEID - never >understood Dutch diphthongs : ). English cognate should look like 'TIDE'. >The strangest thing is that this word exists, but is translated as 'marea' >(Gosh, once I knew the German word for that, but now... Bumme? - hope >that's >not a badword, at least). Anyway it seems once upon a time it meant 'time' >as well, exemples are 'noontide' or 'yuletide', quite obsolete, I know, but >they're on my little dictionary. So, how's it possible? Where's the -d >gone? >Where's the -m from? When did 'time' displace 'tide'?
Icelandic also has "ti'mi" ['thi:mI] for the same meaning. And "ti'd" as an older word, now being more like 'season'. I used to think "ti'mi" was a dirty loan-word from English, which got it from Romance. However, I think that's wrong. I also recently saw, in an article disgussing time-words in Old English, mention of the OE word "tima". I suspect the 'time' word is Germanic. It looks like it's related to Fr. 'temps', Sp. 'tiempo', etc, but then the Germanic form should have initial /T/, not /t/. So I don't know; the master etymologists here will surely provide us with an answer, right? Oskar ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com