Questions about 'take' and 'touch'
From: dgkilday57
Message: 63950
Date: 2009-05-28
Old Norse <taka>, <to:k>, <tekinn> 'take' and Gothic <te:kan>, <tai'to:k>, <te:kans> 'touch' are problematic since we don't expect PIE roots of the form *deg- or *deHg-. Simple ideas occurred to me and I'd like to know if they can be easily dismissed, so I don't waste time pursuing faulty hypotheses.
For ON <taka>, I wonder if we can use PIE *doH3w- with fortition of */Hw/ to */k/ in NWGmc (as in 'quick'). The root *deH3- commonly has a /w/-extension in various IE branches. It usually means 'give', but Hittite <da-aH-Hi> means 'I take' and there is no semantic problem getting from 'take (for someone)' to 'give (to someone)'; we have other examples of this shift. In this view <taka> would be inherited and regular.
For Goth. <te:kan>, I wonder if we can postulate late borrowing of a Schallwort from the same source which gave Romance *toccare 'to touch', originally 'to knock against'. Diez tried to derive *toccare from OLG *tokko:n, *tukken 'to draw with force, pluck' but the semantics are virtually impossible; Meyer-Luebke supposed a Schallwort *tocc 'knock!' and this is generally accepted. Now, whatever the source of this *tocc (Hunnish perhaps??), I imagine a variant *to:k 'knock!' entering Gothic, and becoming popularized as a verb in the reduplicated preterit, *te-to:k 'I/he/she knocked', with the rest of the verb then patterned after <le:tan>, <lai'lo:t>, <le:tans> 'let' and the like.
If anyone can point out problems with these ideas, it will save me a lot of time.
DGK