Re: [tied] personal names

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 14697
Date: 2002-08-28

 
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Pollington
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2002 7:49 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] personal names

> The reflex of *gaisaz in OE is 'gar' (spear) now 'gore' in the technical sense of a V-shaped slit.
 
Exactly, though it comes from the weak noun <ga:ra> related to <ga:r>. The latter survived into Modern English as dialectal <gore> 'cattle-goad'; OED quotes it from a 19th-c. Somerset dialect wordbook. The verb <gore> 'stab, wound' is sometimes said to belong here, but its etymology is uncertain. <garfish> contains the 'spear' word as its first element. OE ga:r, ON geirr etc. survive also (albeit obscured) in a number of still popular names. Finally, <goad> (OE ga:d) may be a more distant relative < PGmc. *gaido: < *gHai-ta:, if *gHaiso- is to be cut morphologically into *gHai-so-.
 
Piotr