Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1970, Blaðsíða 88

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Gaelic taom — a Norse loan?
bite or morsel’, which made Holger Pedersen7 compare it with
a Brythonic noun: Welsh tam(aid), Cornish tam, Breton tamm
‘a bite or morsel, a piece’. But this word stem is obviously
pre-Norse Celtic and can have no connection whatever with
O.N. tøma, although one of the meanings of Ir. taom: ‘jot,
particle’ shows that an earlier Ir. *tem has changed its form
(cp. footnote 7) and become homonymous with taom.
Gaelic taom cannot be shown to have had a palatalized
initial at any time. Its earliest recorded occurrences are listed
in Contributions8 as a noun, taem or toem, with several
meanings (the spellings ae and oe denote one and the same
phoneme in Middle Irish). A derived verbal noun taemad
(equivalent to Modern Gaelic taomadh) had, already in Middle
Irish, the meaning of ‘emptying, baling out’.
These are the reasons why it has been so difficult to connect
Gaelic taom with O.N. tøma from the point of view of histori-
cal phonology. But the material on which we have built our
rejection of the hypothesis is far too scanty. If we have a few
examples of O.N. ø being represented by Modern Gaelic /e:/,
this does not preclude the possibility of O.N. ø having been
rendered by other Gaelic vowels at different times, in diffe-
rent localities and in different phonetic environments. In fact,
it seems most unlikely that O.N. ø should have been con-
stantly replaced by e in Gaelic borrowings, especially in view
of the fact that Gaelic, in the Viking Ages, cannot be shown
to have possessed any long vowel that was particularly similar
to [ø:].9 The Norse language of that period had at least nine
simple vowels of long prosody: /i: e: æ: a: y: ø: u: o: 9:/, while
Gaelic had six at most: /i: e: a: u: o:/ and the antecedent of
7 Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen, Vol. II, Gottin-
gen, 1909, p. 60.
8 Contrihutions to a Dictionary of the Irish Language, Fasciculus T -
tnuthaigid, Dublin, 1943.
9 Holger Pedersen’s postulated ó in Early Irish (op. cit., Vol. I, pp.
339 f.) may have been somewhat similar in quality but was probably
always short. Its lengthening in certain environments is a later develop-
ment.