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Germanic Lexicon Project
Message Board
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Author: Brian Lewis (Campbell University)
Email: briandavidlewis at gmail dot com
Date: 2010-07-07 00:43:06
Subject: Re: How is Gothic 'weihs' pronounced?
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> Curt,
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> After looking a little further, I found the word you're discussing. Bosworth/Toller lists a word wíce meaning "office, duty, function".
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> So let's say that your question is this: is there any etymological connection between wicca "wizard, soothsayer" and wíce "office, duty, function"?
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> The short answer is that the standard references (meaning the OED and Bosworth and Toller) don't list any such etymological connection, nor could I find such a connection in Torp. I can see a way that the two words could be connected, but the connection would be an old one; even if it were real, it would probably no longer have been obvious to speakers of Old English.
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> As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a verb wiccian in Old English meaning "to practice witchcraft"; this verb has cognates in a couple of other West Germanic languages, but is of unknown origin. The masculine noun wicca "wizard, soothsayer" and the feminine noun wicce "witch" are morphological derivatives of this verb, according to the OED.
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> Notice that the verb wiccian has a short vowel but geminate (double) consonant (-cc-), while wíce has a long vowel and short consonant. If we want to connect the two words, then we have to explain these differences in vowel and consonant length.
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> The long consonant in wiccian 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 wiccian 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-).
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> So can we connect this *wik- with OE wíce? Not in any direct way, because we've still got the problem that wiccian has a short vowel (as do the nouns derived from it), while wíce has a long vowel.
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> However, I can see a way that there could be a very old connection. Proto-Indo-European morphology is characterized by a system of ablaut (changing vowels, as in English sing sang sung). I'm not going to explain all the details here, but here's a bare bones account. In Germanic, the PIE diphthong *ei changes to the the long monophthong *
. If you had an e-grade *weig- alongside a zero-grade *wig-, the former would become *wk- in Germanic, while the latter would become *wik-.
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> I don't know whether there is such a connection. However, the morphological patterns and the regular sound changes of Germanic do allow the possibility of such a connection (whether the semantics are plausibly related is a separate question and one which can't be answered mechanically). As I said, however, even if there is such a connection, it would probably not have been obvious to the average speaker of Old English, just as the average speaker of modern English probably sees no connection between, say, lose and forlorn.
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> --Sean
Regarding the West-Germanic verb *''wikjana'', when WGmc consonants geminate, do they not typically lose the ''j'' (the ''j'' in essence becoming the geminate consonant)? So that the end result of *''wikjana'' would be *''wikkan''?