From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 177
Date: 1999-11-04
----- Original Message -----From: Marc VerhaegenSent: Thursday, November 04, 1999 11:26 PMSubject: [cybalist] Re: Odp: The date of PIE.Dutch etymological diccionaries leave little doubt that (all?) words on -ooi and -ouw have the same etymology, eg, Etymologisch Woordenboek Van Dale: "de verbindingen ooi en ouw wisselden afhankelijk van de oorspronkelijke vervoeging; vgl. naast Gotisch taujan de verleden tijd tawido, zoals in gouw, Gooi e.d." (translation: "the combinations ooi and ouw varied according to the original conjugation; cf. Gothic taujan with the past tense tawido, as in gouw, Gooi and such"). IMO this makes the connection touw-tooi rather certain. If we take touw (PIE *deu??) 'rope, cord, string' as the original meaning, the other meanings could be derived (eg, 'to spin': the cords ca.3000 BC in the Pontic area were made of hemp; or the verb touwen 'finishing leather'). The decoration with a cord was the last thing that had to be done before the pot (beaker) was finished (before baking), so tooien 'to decorate' was easily derived from the word for 'touw', as if you said in English "I still have to cord the pot [and then it's finished]", cf. voltooien means 'to finish', rather different from tooien).
It's certainly generally true that words in -ooi and -ouw are etymologically equivalent, but this need not be true of an odd individual case. What I'm suggesting is that historical development has produced a pair of apparent equivalents. Homonymy often arises in a that way. To quote a comparable case, in English meadow = mead (an area of grassland, not honey wine) and shadow = shade (historically different declensional forms of the same nouns), but it does not follow that, e.g. mallow = male. The two mead words, by the way, are spelt and pronounced the same but have very different histories and did not become identical before late Middle English. I'm not saying that your connection is evidently wrong, but that it may be impossible to verify.Piotr