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Author: Peter
Date: 2005-04-08 16:11:26
Subject: Re: How is Gothic 'weihs' pronounced?
> I suspect that the definition for wica (wise) given by writers sixty years ago derives from Old Norse vaca "awakened" confused with Old English waca "awakening," and Old Norse vika, a variant of vaka, confused with Old English wica, a variant of waca. In modern (sort of) Scottish, wice is a spelling of "wise."
Hi Curt,
I'm a bit confused myself now, but at the moment I reckon the connection with Modern English "wit", etc., looks strongest. Consider Old Norse:
vitki "wizard" (masculine)
vitka "bewitch" (class 2 weak verb)
vitta "bewitch" (class 1 weak verb)
vitt "sorcery, charms" (neuter)
The first of these, according to Cleasby & Vigfusson, is cognate with Old English 'witega' "prophet", Old High German 'wizago' (later altered by folk-etymology to Weissager, lit. "wise-sayer"). These are supposed to be formed from the verb 'vita' "to know" = OE 'witan'. In other Indo-European languages outside of Germanic the root means "to see", cf. Latin 'video'.
The connection of witchcraft with wych-elm (Ulmus montana), etc. certainly exists in folklore. But the Oxford English Dictionary considers the element wych-, wich- in such tree names to come from a Germanic root meaning "bend", in reference to their pliable twigs. In the case of wicken (=rowan, Pyrus aucuparia), the earlier spellings are actually 'quikentre' (1387), Quicken tree (1548). OED: "An OE. cwictreow is found in glosses, rendering an obscure L. cresis or gnesis." (...hence Tolkien's Quickbeam). OE 'cwic' "alive" > MnE 'quick'. The name might have been altered to make it sound more like "witch", or by analogy with those bendy trees. I don't know.
So yes, there are all sorts anomalies and mysteries in etymology. People have been wondering where words came from for a long time, and occasionally changing them on the basis of supposed etymologies. There is no regular loss of /k/ before /w/ at the beginning of words in Standard English, but here for some unpredictable reason an exception has been made. Or to put it another way, the word 'quicken' has been replaced by the word 'wicken', rather than being subject to any general "sound change".
> As for sound changes, you and Mr. Christ both state that they are not random, but aren't there ANY exceptions to the rule? I observe them in modern English all the time, and some of them eventually take hold. Also, since the writers of Old English didn't have standardized spelling, couldn't they have blundered just as happily as the rest of us?
Yes, of course there are exceptions. I think the idea of calling a sound change regular though, is that if a particular sound undergoes that change in one word, that sound will undergo the same change in every other word where it appears in the same circumstances, unless some special event gets in the way, such as borrowings between related dialects, or misunderstandings, or jokes, or taboos, or any number of other things. Regularity isn't infallible, then, and can't explain everything, and nor as far as I know are specific changes predictable in advance, although some changes can be seen to be more likely than others. On the other hand, if there wasn't a lot of structure, it wouldn't be possible to detect any rules at all governing correspondances between dialect that parted company thousands of years ago.
Peter