Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1970, Page 86

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Gaelic taom — a Norse loan?
items with similar meanings, but whose Norse origins have
never been definitely established.
One of these words is the verb taom,3 which exists both
in Irish and Scottish Gaelic. In most places where this mor-
pheme is found as a verbal stem, one of its several meanings
is ‘to bale’, used either transitively: ‘to bale a boat (of water)’;
‘to bale water (out of a boat)’, or intransitively: ‘to bale’, with
the object understood. The vowel written ao is pronounced as
in other Gaelic words in which it is found between non-palatal
consonants (e.g. taobh ‘side’). In most Sc.G. dialects and
many of the northern dialects of Irish this is a long, back-to-
central high unrounded vowel. In other North Irish dialects
it belongs to the phoneme /i:/ but has the allophonic lowering
and retraction characteristic of that phoneme in non-palatal
environments. In some Sc.G. dialects the vowel is mid instead
of high, and sometimes labialized under the influence of the
following m, which makes its auditory effect very similar to
that of [ø:] for any listener accustomed to rounded front
vowels. For the southern dialects of Irish I have found no
indication of the pronounciation of taom, but there is little
reason to doubt that the word, if used at all, would be pro-
nounced whith the same vowel as /te:v/ taobh ‘side’. The Ir.
variant spelling taodhm hardly reflects a different pronunci-
ation. The vowel is always long, and nasalized in those dia-
lects where nasalization is common, indicating that the vowel
has been in direct contact whith the m for a long time.
The meaning ‘to bale’, taken in conjunction with the not
infrequent [ø:]-like pronunciation of the vowel written ao,
makes it almost unavoidable to attempt an identification with
O.N. tøma (Modern Icelandic tæma, Faroese and western
Norwegian tøma (tøme), eastern Norwegian and Danish
tømme, Swedish tómma) ‘to empty’, derived from the ad-
jectival stem tóm- ‘empty’. Such an indentification was, how-
s Gaelic verbs are cited in their stem forms, which, in the regular
verbs, are identical with the 2nd person singular of the imperative. Their
English translations are given in the infinitive.