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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at unagi dot cis dot upenn dot edu
Date: 2005-02-17 18:10:50
Subject: Re: How is Gothic 'weihs' pronounced?
> Thank you so much. Do you think this word could be related to
> Old Ennglish 'wica' (week-ah), which sounds similar,
> given your explaination of the 'h'? If 'wica'
> means an advisor, officer, or awakened (enlightened) person (what a
> nightmare trying to track it down), and is supposedly Old Saxon
> (or some such), and if the noun form of 'weihs' is
> 'weiha,' isn't it possible that one evolved into the
> other over a period of centuries (the way 'media' is now
> used as a singular noun, or 'love-lived' is pronounced
> with a short 'i', or 'via' has become
> 'veea'? If words can be corrupted in one generation,
> what about over many generations? Especially if the culture is illiterate?
First, let's talk about the principles of historical/comparative linguistics. If two words are cognate, it means that they are inherited from the same word in an earlier parent language. English fish and German Fisch are cognate because each language inherits the word from Proto-Germanic *fiskaz. Note that inheritance and borrowing are two different things (English has borrowed lots of words from Latin, but it has inherited no words from Latin because Latin is not an ancestor of English).
To say that two words are "related" is vague. Related how? Related because they are cognate? Related because one is a loan from the other? Related because one is morphologically derived from the other? I'll assume in this discussion that you're asking whether "weihs" and "wica" are cognate.
When languages change over time, it is not the case that individual words randomly change their pronunciation. Rather, languages undergo regular sound changes, which means that if a certain sound changes in one word, that sound makes the same change in all words. For example, Proto-Indo-European *p became *f in Proto-Germanic in most environments; but Italic didn't undergo this sound change, which is why you find systematic *p/*f correspondences between English and Latin: fish/piscis, father/pater, foot/ped-, etc.
(Historical linguists don't talk about languages becoming "corrupted"; there is merely regular sound change. Languages change happens according to the same principles regardless of whether the speakers are literate or illiterate.)
Cognate does not mean "similar in sound and meaning". Cognates often happen to be similar in sound and meaning, but similarity is neither necessary nor sufficient for two words to be cognate. English "much" is similar in sound and meaning to Spanish "mucho", but the two words are not cognate; the similarity is an accident. Conversely, English "song" is cognate with Greek "omphe" (meaning "oracular chant"), even tho the two words sound nothing alike.
Claiming cognation on the basis of similarity and meaning is such a common fallacy that there's a name for such claims: Gleichklangsetymologien (German: like-sound-etymologies).
So how do we determine that words are cognate? The key has to do with the regularity of sound change. If you have a word in English starting with p-, and a word in Latin starting with p-, then the words cannot be cognate, because Proto-Indo-European *p changed to *f in Germanic. If every sound in the two words corresponds, and if the meanings of the two words are plausibly traceable to some earlier meaning, then the two words might be cognate.
Now, to the case you're discussing. Proto-Germanic *h stays h in Gothic, and it usually stays h in Old English except when it deletes between two vowels (as in *slahana > sl
an "to slay). Likewise, Proto-Germanic *k stays k in Gothic; in Old English it either stays k (spelled c) or else is palatalized to a "ch" sound in specific environments (but it's still spelled c).
So an Old English word "wica" cannot be cognate with Gothic "weihs". There is no sound in Proto-Germanic which would come out as "k" (spelled c) in Old English but "h" in Gothic.
This much can be said on the basis of the sound correspondences alone. However, I question whether there is any such word "wica" meaning "advisor, officer, or awakened (enlightened) person" in Old English. It's not listed in Bosworth/Toller (the most comprehensive dictionary of OE completed so far) nor in Clark/Hall, and a search of the OED does not turn it up (except as a variant modern spelling of Modern English wicca, the name of the neo-pagan movement). There certainly is a word wicca in Old English, but its meaning is "wizard, soothsayer, sorcerer, magician", not "advisor" or "officer". The OED lists wicca as a noun derived from the verb wiccian "to practice witchcraft." This verb has cognates in a couple of other West Germanic languages, but its origin is unknown. In any case, I can't find any evidence for a word "wica" meaning "advisor" or "officer" in Old English. Where did you find it?
--Sean