Re: [tied] Re: bake

At 9:07:39 AM on Friday, April 11, 2003, tgpedersen wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 5:00:15 AM on Friday, April 11, 2003, tgpedersen wrote:

>>> My original question, to which I still don't know the
>>> answer, was whether that preparing-food word was related
>>> to the sharing/distributing(-food?) word in Iranian that
>>> eventually in tht Slavic languages became 'Bog' "God"
>>> (and the root of the 'bogat- ' "rich" word).

>> Not according to Watkins, who derives Engl <bake> from
>> *bHeh1- 'to warm' (or rather, from the zero-grade
>> extension *bH&g-) and Slavic <bogU> from *bhag- 'to share
>> out; to get a share'. Looks like he largely concurs with
>> Pokorny on these two roots.

> The latter, since it's Iranian, would be PIE *bhog-,
> right?

No, *bHag-. This is apparently a genuine *a.

> And at least Swedish has 'baka' [ba:ka] with -a:- ; how
> does that long vowel develop out of a zero-grade
> extension?

The Gmc vowel is short: OE <bacan> 'to bake', ON <baka> 'to
bake; to warm and rub the body and limbs'. In the passage
from OEScand to modern Swedish many short vowels were
lengthened. I don't know all of the rules -- apparently
there were dialect differences and a lot of subsequent
levelling -- but one of them is /a/ > /a:/ before a single
consonant.

Brian