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Author: Peter Tunstall
Email: penteract at oe dot eclipse dot co dot uk
Date: 2005-02-22 16:40:19
Subject: Re: How is Gothic 'weihs' pronounced?
> The long consonant in <i>wiccian</i> is not hard to explain. In West Germanic, all consonants except *r become geminated before *j. So we can imagine a Pre-Proto-West-Germanic verb *wikjana which would change to *wikkjan in Proto-West-Germanic; this would come out as <i>wiccian</i> in Old English by the regular sound changes. The verb looks like one of a very common class of verbs in Germanic which form their present tense with the suffix *-ja- (PIE *-ye/yo-).
Sean & Curt,
Gemination: true, with the proviso that this change only takes place after a short vowel. But wouldn't OE wiccian be a Class 2 weak verb, from *wikkojana, rather than Class 1 *wik(k)jana? The later ought to give give OE wiccan (cf. bycgan, etc). Still, if it was originally a Class 1 weak verb, I suppose it might have changed conjugation by analogy with other Class 2 verbs with the meaning "to perform the role/office/function of..., to act as..."
Just a guess, but if it wasn't for those pesky Low German forms (wikken, wicken), it would be tempting to imagine a derivation from *witjan > wicce (cf. *kraft(i)ja > cræfca "workman"; *gefetjan > gefeccan > MnE fetch; ort geard > orceard > MnE orchard; see Campbell's OE grammar, para. 434, whence these examples). This would suggest a meaning like "wise woman". I'm pretty ignorant about the history of Low German, Old Saxon, as yet, so I don't know if wikken can be explained by regular sound changes there--but the English process depends on palatalisation, which wouldn't apply in Low German, as far as I know. Or could wikken be a loan from English or Frisian?
There is an OE word wítga, wítega "prophet, wiseman" (long root vowel). Thinking purely of OE sound changes, OE wicce < *witjan might be a parallel formation from the short grade of vowel (the sing-sang-sung thing!). Or maybe it's the same word, with the vowel shortened according to the change described by Campbell 285.2 "if at least two unaccented syllables follow" (this could apply to the verb, cf. bletsian, and have been extended by analogy to the noun; in the noun itself, I think only the genitive pl., wiccena, has the required multiple unstressed syllables).
Here are some more ideas:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=witch
(But the derivation of wicca can't be derived directly from *wikkjaz, as it's a different declension--which doesn't rule out it being the same root.)
I've seen wíce related to wícgerefa, a kind of official. There is an OE word wíc "village, town, dwelling", which survives in placenames as -wich and -wick. The OED says "apparently from L. vícus "row of houses, quarter of a city, street, village". The root of the Latin word may be cognate with Gothic weihs "village"--that is, they could both be descended from the same Indo-European root, as shown by the regular correspondance of Gothic/Germanic to Latin . This shows one way in which apparent exceptions to the regular sound changes can occur: namely borrowing. Others include the alteration of the spoken or written form of a word to suit a supposed etymology, e.g. the unpronounced -s- in Modern English "island", due to an erroneous association with French isle. I assume it's the chance similarity in sound that led to the popular association of wicken trees with witchcraft. But till we're sure of the real etymology of "witch", who knows...
Good thing sound changes aren't random though: that really would be confusing.
Peter