Re: [tied] Meet, meet, and mete

At 1:24:48 PM on Sunday, September 25, 2005, A. wrote:

> I was looking at a few terms on the AHDIER website:

I've taken the liberty of converting HTML codes to readable
characters.

> Meet (1) = "To come upon by chance or arrangement." and
> saw it was derived from Middle English meten; originally
> from Old English me:tan.

> Meet (2) = "Fitting; proper" seems to derive from Middle
> English mete, from Old English gemæ:te. See med-
> in Appendix I.

> Mete = "To distribute by or as if by measure; allot; To
> measure. From the Middle English meten, from Old English
> metan. See med- in Appendix I.

> Does this mean that while mete and meet(2) have the same
> root, the two forms of "meet" come from different roots?

Yes. In Watkins' separately published American Heritage
Dictionary of Indo-European Roots you'll find a root *mo:d-
(from *meh3d-) 'to meet, to assemble' to which <meet> (1) is
referred. You can also find the root in the on-line
versions of Pokorny, e.g., at
<http://www.ieed.nl/cgi-bin/startq.cgi?flags=endnnnl&root=leiden&basename=%5Cdata%5Cie%5Cpokorny>.
(Search on 'meet' in the English meaning field.)

> I was told the term mæþel (maethel) "assembly, council,"
> derives from root of me:tan "to meet". It seems to make
> sense well enough.

From the same PIE root, yes; <mæþel> seems to be from the
suffixed zero-grade form *m@...

> It would likewise seem that the term Metod "Measurer",
> stems from mete (and thus med-).

Yes. Search on the root 'med' in the Pokorny database.

> I assume that maethel and metod have no shared root?

Correct.

Brian