Time and Zeit

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size NotesThe other Germanic words in this field also deserve etymological reconsideration: Go. þeihs, OE þing-gemearc ‘measured time’; Go. mēl, ON mál, OE mǣl, OHC māl ‘fixed time, meal time’; Go. hweila, OE hwil, OHG wīla ‘period of time, hour,’ ON hvila ‘resting place, bed’; ON, OE stunde, OHG stunta ‘period of time,’ NHG Stunde ‘hour’: ON bil ‘time, point in time.’ What is required is a semantic-field study of these words and their interrelationships as well as an investigation of their individual histories. Such an ambitious undertaking is beyond the scope of this short etymological essay.The evolution of NE tide and NHG Gezeiten ‘the periodic rise and fall of the ocean’ is a side-development within the lexical family. Because etymological evidence almost contumaciously resists elegant and simple formulation, this development wants separate treatment. The experience of eternal return of certain temporal phenomena asserted itself in this particular and separate turn of evolution in the lexical family. In OHG gezîti f. pl. ‘ecclesiastical festival,’ MHG gezît ‘hour of prayer,’ NHG Gezeiten, Falk-Torp maintain that the collective prefix ge- corresponds to the Latin prefix re- and that thereby the ever-recurrent nature of these events is expressed. I dispute that. OHG gezîti is a collection of similar events. The prefix ge- in these formations no more refers to temporal sequence than it does in NHG Gebirge, Gestirn. What is expressed is the fact that a number of events resemble each other. The forms to be found in England and the Netherlands simply did not make use of this morphological device: NE tide, early NDu. tijde, NDu. tij. Middle Low German shows both tide and getide. Collectivity and sequence are not related notions. OE tid and ON tioir in the sense of ‘ecclesiastical feasts at the canonical times’ shows that the continental development was contingent and secondary. That these events constantly recur lies in the nature of the world and not in these morphological formations. That the morphological device does not correspond to the exterior reality of events is shown in the contrast of NHG Gezeiten ‘tide’ and Zeiten ‘menstruation.’ That Zeiten is indubitably a loan-translation of the learned Periode does not vitiate this argument one bit. It only demonstrates the point that continuity or repetition is a superfluous and misleading concept in any discussion of this etymological family. The still-surviving ambivalence in NE tide illustrates that the semantic split in the word family came about as a specialization in order to create a practical device for controlling reality.Feist, VEGW, p. 423a adopts Kluge’s etymology of the second element of Go. sinteins with no reservations. My own etymology below permits us to establish a much more lucid explanation of the Gothic compound. Feist’s contribution is the etymological identification of the first element of the compound. The element sin- is also to be found in ON si-, OE, OFries., OS, OHG sin- ‘constant, lasting,’ cf. ON si-fella ‘uninterrupted series,’ OE sin-niht(e) ‘eternal night.’ Feist finds the root in IE *sem- ‘one’ which can refer to something of a unitary, unchanging nature, cf. Lat. semper ‘always.’If this entry is not an oversight, it is certainly misleading. *tīþ in itself could not yield OHG zit. For the operation of Verner’s law, we must assume some sort of suffix with accent.For other authorities who adhere to this etymology see Falk-Torp, II, 1564.The arrangement of events in relative order is an operation of quite another sort and dimension. The intricate problems of the ordering of events within the grammatical structure of a particular language are treated with clarity and finesse in William Bull’s Time, Tense, and the Verb (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960), in the series, University of California Publications in Linguistics, Vol. XIX.I have resisted my own inclination to subject the root to a laryngeal analysis. The traditional analysis of ablaut relationships is quite adequate for the purposes of this study. A possible analysis as *de X-y-t y- has been omitted because the positing of such a form would, at this point, be unproductive

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