Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1970, Side 87

Gaelic taom — a Norse loan?
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ever, emphatically rejected by Alexander MacBain4 and —
much later, and with less confidence — by myself.5 My attempt
at identification failed (a) because I was reluctant to admit
that the O.N. sound sequence tøm- could have developed into
taom in a loanword transferred to Gaelic, and (b) because 1
found it difficult to reconcile the meaning of the Norse
word with that of the Gaelic one: I knew, at that time, Gaelic
taom mainly in the meaning ‘to pour’, as a liquid or granular
substance from one receptacle into another, while the nearest
semantic counterpart to O.N. tøma was, to my knowledge, the
verb fal(a)mhaich, derived from the Gaelic adjective falamh
‘empty’.
Subsequent studies have shown that I was wrong as regards
both form and meaning.
(a) F o r m. It is true that Gaelic taom from O.N. tøma is
not what one would predict as the most likely development.
In the material collected and analysed so far there are very
few examples af the Gaelic treatment of O.N. ø, but in the
few certain instances I have (the best are the two Hebridean
place-names Greineam from O.N. Grønholmr and Greineabhal
from Grønafjall), O.N. has originally been rendered as Middle
Gaelic e and later leveloped accordingly.6 The expected Middle
Gaelic rendition of O.N. tøm- would, therefore, be *tem,
which would subsequently have developed into such forms
as Modern Gaelic *teum, *team, *team, pronounced either
with a long [e:] or, as often happens before non-palatal
consonants, with a secondary diphthong [ia]. The expected
initial would be a distinctly palatalized [t'], not the non-
palatal [t] of taom. There is actually a Sc.G. verb teum, with
a noun of the same form, but this verb means essentially ‘to
bite or snatch’, and the noun means, among other things, ‘a
4 An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, Stirling, 1911,
p. 359.
s The Gaelic of Leurbost, Isle of Lewis, Oslo, 1956, p. 86.
1 See Norsk Tidsskrift for Sprogvidenskap, Vol. XVII, Oslo, 1954.