MATERIA Y ENERGÍA

seem to belong with other b-k words, while

*baukn- belongs with OE bu¤¤k and its cognates.

The earliest ‘bak’ must have been a float, a buoy (a similar case is ModI dufl ‘buoy, beacon’; dufla ‘splash about’). If ‘growth’ can be equated with ‘swelling (out),’ Go bagms will fit the b-g group, though -m- remains problematic. Gmc *bau-m- eas- ily aligns itself with Bau-ch, Bau-sch, for not only stops but also resonants can be attached to bu¤ ~ bau-, as in G Beule ‘bump, boil’ (OHG bûla, bu°la,

bu¤lla, bu°lla ‘bladder, etc’—note the wealth of forms

typical of onomatopoeic and sound symbolic for- mations—OS bûlia, OE by¤l, by¤le, OFr be¤l, beil, and Go ufbauljan* ‘puff up,’ OI bóla ‘boil,’ alongside ModI beyla ‘lump’ and the unexplained Eddic name Beyla). It unnecessary to set up one etymon for bagms and Baum. Bagms may be a blend (*bag-az with a suffix from *baum-az; cf. Uhlenbeck, above). Bogey, boggle, and the rest emphasize the frightening aspect of the objects designated by b-g words, so that a meaning like ‘apparition’ was not too remote even from bac ‘buoy,’ especially if an- cient buoys were visible at night. But beacon is not a synonym of buoy (although the similarity of their function must have led to some influence in one or more directions), for beacons were signal fires on a coast, wooden towers, branches tied to poles, and so forth. *Baukn- is particularly difficult because of its -n. Neither bak nor *baukn- should be me-

chanically projected to Proto-Indo-European. Both are members of the big-bag-bu¤¤k-pig litter,

and their age is indeterminate. Setting up ancient participles and an n-enlargement is a futile pro- cedure. If Bugge’s etymology is rejected, the ori- gin of -n remains a puzzle. Most probably, it ap- peared in *baukn- under the influence of *taikn-, in which -n is a genuine suffix.

Gmc *taikn- had strong religious (magical) connotations. Finn taika (from Germanic) means ‘divination, portent’ (on this word see especially Collinder [1932:204-15]). OI …krossa ok ovll heilovg tákn ‘crosses (acc pl) and all holy signs’ (Njáls saga, quoted in CV under tákn) is reminiscent of OS bôkan endi bilidi and of the English biblical phrase

tokens and wonders (see OED, token, sb4_{). Ta¤cen and}

be¤acen have almost completely overlapping glosses

in dictionaries of Old English. Be¤acen: “beacon,” sign, token, phenomenon, portent, apparition;

standard, banner; audible signal. Ta¤cen “token,” symbol, sign, signal, mark, indication, suggestion; portent, marvel, wonder, miracle; evidence, proof; standard, banner (Clark Hall). Exodus has both

friobe¤acen and friota¤cn for ‘sign of peace.’ Be¤acen

and ta¤cen often occurred together, as in Beowulf 140-41 (…ta¤ him gebe¤acnod wæs… sweotolan ta¤cne… ‘when it was indicated to him by a manifest sign’) and in The Blickling Homilies (ealle ta¤ ta¤cno & ta¤

forebe¤acno…, quoted in OED, token, sb5_{), and see the}

examples in Klaeber (1912:122). Even the phonetic variation in the second syllables be¤acen ~ be¤acn,

ta¤cen ~ ta¤cn is the same in both pairs. The fact of

interaction between *baukn- and *taikn- is com- monplace in etymological studies (WP II:123).

Three or four words meaning ‘sign; omen’ must at first have referred to different phenomena. For example, according to Üçok (1938:38-40), Go bandwa* was restricted to concrete signs for dem- onstrating a meaning, and Go fauratani* meant ‘su- pernatural sign,’ whereas taikn referred to any sign and was thus a general word (cited approvingly in Feist-Lehmann, *bandwa). However, taikn also meant ‘sign’ and ‘portent, miracle,’ as did Gk

shmei~on (which that Gothic noun renders) and

tûraj. Gothic did not have *baukn; it would proba- bly have turned up if it had existed. Its presumed nonexistence is indirect proof that WGmc *baukn-

emerged late, crossed the path of *taikn- (an old word), and partly usurped its functions. Go fau-

ratani* must be another local innovation.

6. The etymology of beacon < *bauk-n- will be incomplete without a few remarks on buoy, which is in turn connected with BOY. Diez’s theory (1466,

boja) reproduced in ODEE, traces MDu bo(e)ye (ModDu boei) to OF boie ~ buie ‘chain, fetter,’ a word that is mentioned elsewhere in Germanic etymologies: see Feist3 _{at baidjan* ‘compel.’ As}

Modéer (1943:141) pointed out, floating buoys are never chained, and being anchored could hardly be looked on as their most conspicuous feature. The main difficulty consists in the fact that the origin of the French word is unknown.

Diez’s derivation of boie from Late L boia ‘fet- ter’ poses phonetic problems, regardless of whether o in boia is short or long. (See Vidos [1957:96, note 2], on the vowel length.) A. Tobler’s attempt (1896:862) to rescue Diez’s etymology met with little success. Nigra’s conjecture (1903) that

bouée goes back to L bo¤(v)a ‘snake,’ reg Ital boa ‘rope

or floating log used as a signal,’ because the chain of a buoy reflects the light and resembles a water snake, also found few supporters (see only Pianigiani [boia]). Most other authors of the mod-

ern dictionaries of the Romance languages (for ex- ample, Battisti-Alessio, Devoto [boia], Corominas [boya]) and NEW trace the French word to MHG bouchen (the same, much earlier, Schuchardt [1901:346-47, 1903:611]) or Old Franconian bôkan (ML, 1005). In French, *bokan allegedly changed to

boi (as it did in F jouer ‘play’ from L joca¤ri) and re-

turned to Middle Dutch as bo(e)ye. Considering the late appearance of the French word (the end of the 15th _{century), this reconstruction looks strained.}

Vidos (1957:95-105, esp 103-04) suggested that the etymon of the French word is MDu bo(e)ye (boie, boey, boei), which owes its origin to OF buie ‘chain,’ from boia. His article deals with so-called organic etymology. This is how Szemerényi (1962:179) summarizes Vidos’s views: “[I]f a member of a technical, especially nautical vocabulary, is of un- known origin, it is likely to derive from the same source as other words of the same field, especially if the first attestation is roughly of the same date as the others; if the word denotes an integral part of the object, the probability is even greater. The use- fulness of the principle is demonstrated by Prof. Vidos on French bouée ‘buoy,’ which has at long last been traced to its Dutch source.” In this case, the “organic” element is the progression anchor— chain—buoy, with buoy getting its name from an object that constitutes its inalienable part. FEW (XV:83, *baukn) tentatively sides with Vidos. Modéer, whose investigation predates Vidos’s by many years, subscribed to the *bokan theory. Hardly anyone remembers that Bilderdijk I:120 saw a reflex of bode in Du boei, for beacons are sig- nals (‘messengers’) of storms, or that Van den Helm (1861:207-08) traced Du boie to Ital tempo boio ‘dark weather.’

Both Schuchardt’s etymology (in its original form or modified by Meyer-Lübke [see also EWFS, bouée] and Vidos’s radical revision of it presuppose that the word for ‘buoy’ wandered from a Ger- manic language to Old French and returned to Middle Dutch, to designate the same object in a new way. The question arises why Dutch speakers needed to borrow the Old French word. It is more

natural to suppose that MDu bo(e)ye was a native word and spread from its center to other lan- guages. French also had beekenes (pl) (Cameron

[1892], Ott [1892]).

Boi and boy (see BOY) are creatures that frighten

people with the sounds they make (bo, boo, and the like). But, as already pointed out, the same ‘devils’ could inflate themselves and inspire awe by being both loud and big, whence Du bui ‘squall’ (another word recorded late). Low German borrowed this

word as Bö and Böje, High German as Bö, Swedish as by, but Danish as byge; byge resembles forms like E bogey more than Du bui. With MDu bo(e)ye as native, the following triad presents itself: MDu bo(e)ye ‘buoy,’ ME boi ‘devil’ (an almost extinct meaning), and late MDu bui ‘squall.’ If we allow ‘inflation, swelling out’ and ‘noise’ to be related concepts in describing demons, natural phenom- ena, and all kinds of objects, those three words will form a close-knit group. Puck and boy were proba- bly evil spirits that struck fear in people by puffing themselves up and occasionally roaring, moaning, howling, and whistling. Bui was their inhuman incarnation, whereas man-made buoys were big and inflated.

7. Germanic had numerous words beginning with b and p and alternating vowels. All of them were vaguely synonymous, and their meanings were unpredictable: ‘something big,’ ‘something loud (and frightening).’ They could end in a con- sonant, as a rule in g, k, d, and t, but a resonant, most often l, was allowed too. Bugs and bogeys swelled out and made a lot of noise. Other words designated harmless objects. One such object was a float called bak. Since it showed the way to ships, it acquired the meaning ‘sign.’ Another sign was called *baukn-. Perhaps it had some magical senses from the start, but, more probably, it acquired a set of elevated meanings and the suffix -n under the influence of the ancestor of modern token ~ tecken ~ Zeichen. ModI bákn still refers, nonspecifically, to a huge formless mass. The words discussed here are not restricted to Germanic: they occur, sometimes in identical form, in Sanskrit, Classical Greek, Ro- mance, Slavic, and Celtic. They are products of primitive creation, and this circumstance makes tracing the routes of borrowings particularly diffi- cult (Liberman [2001a:213-26]).

BIRD (800)

The most frequent Old English form of bird is bridd. Since this noun has been assigned to the Germanic ja-stem (*brid-ja-z, *bred-ja-z), -dd appears to be due to West Ger- manic gemination. Bird surfaced late and is usually explained as a metathesized form of brid(d). Brid(d) supplanted OE

fugol (ModE fowl) as the common name of a flying feathered

animal. The oldest recorded meaning of bird was ‘nestling,’ but in late Middle English it occurred with reference to all kinds of young animals and human beings, from bees to devils.

Bird has been compared with the verbs breed ~ brood and bear ‘give birth,’ the adjective broad, and with several other

words in and outside Germanic. Some etymologists believe in the derivation of bird from bre¤dan ‘breed,’ but the difficulty of connecting OE e¤, from umlauted o¤ (bre¤dan < *bro¤djan),

with OE i from e (or with old i) in bridd has not been solved, and most modern dictionaries call bird a word of unknown origin. The stumbling block in the bird ~ beran etymology is that the earliest recorded form is bridd, not bird. However, that etymology can be rescued if two assumptions are made: that in spite of the discrepancy in dates bird, not brid(d), is the original form and that the original meaning of bird was ‘the young of any animal’ (as recorded in Middle English), not ‘nestling.’ Then bird, from *berd-jo-z, would acquire the meaning ‘born creature’ and join such nouns as *barn- (OE

bearn) ‘child’ (‘bairn’), OE gebyrd ‘offspring,’ OE byre

‘son,’ Sc birky (= bir-k-y) ‘fellow,’ and several others, with cognates elsewhere in Germanic, especially in German.

The sections are devoted to 1) the attested forms of bird, 2) the attested meanings of bird, 3) the proposed derivation of

bird from breed, 4) the proposed derivation of bird from bear

(v), 5) other hypotheses on the origin of bird, and 6) the vindi- cation of the etymology of bird from bear. Section 7 is the conclusion.

1. The Old English forms of bird are brid and bridd. According to the microfiche concordance of the Toronto Dictionary of Old English, it occurs eleven times in the singular and fifty-four times in the plural, practically always with dd. Bird (pl bir- das) has been recorded in Northumbrian glosses.

Bridd, assigned in grammars to the ja-stem, sup-

posedly has a double consonant because of West Germanic gemination. Birdas is believed to be a metathesized form of bridas (SB [sec 179.1]; A.

Campbell [1959:sec 459.2]). The only analogue of such metathesis is irda (tirda) < ridda (tridda) ‘third.’ In Middle English, both words underwent a second metathesis. Luick (1964:secs 432, note 1; 714.1 and note; 756.1) points out that in late Middle English, dirt and thirty were sometimes spelled drit and thritty, whereas the reverse process ri > ir in

tirde and bird occurred in Old English. Bird has no

prehistoric antecedents, so that when Kaluza (1906- 07:I, secs 65a and 85a) calls i and d in bridd reflexes of Proto-Germanic (Urgermanisch), he has in mind a reconstructed rather than an attested form (*bridja). He cites the same two Northumbrian words (tirda and brid) as examples of metathesis (sec 99a). OED gives the form *bridjo-z, and it turns up in Hamp (1981:40, 1989:197-98): Pre-Germanic *b¤red-ja > Gmc *b¤riddja > OE bridd. The earliest occurrence of brid is in a gloss: pullus, brid. Briddas goes back to the year 1000.