Re: English oddities

>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
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