Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1970, Page 91

Gaelic taom — a Norse loan?
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the verb from the adjectival stem tóm-. A Norwegian school-
child who writes ho tømde litt kajfi i koppen ‘she “emptied”
a little coffee into the cup’ will have this corrected, by any
conscientious teacher, to ho helte litt kaffi i koppen, even if
the child, as is often the case, speaks a variety of Norwegian
where tøma is normal and, by local standards, correct for ‘to
pour’. In some Norwegian dialects the verb hella simply does
not exist, having been supplanted entirely by tøma. In other
dialects, such as my own (south-western Norway), the verb
tøma exists in both meanings but can no longer have the
designation of the emptied receptacle as its direct object: tøm
utor den bytta!, literally ‘empty out of that pail!’ is the only
idiomatic expression for ‘empty that pail!’. In colloquial
Swedish we find such expressions as tóm i koppen lite! ‘empty
(i. e. pour) a little into the cup!’. In Faroese one can tøma
mjólk í spannina ‘empty milk into the bucket’ and tøma mjólk
úr spannini ‘empty milk out of the bucket’. And even in
Modern Icelandic, the most conservative of all Nordic lan-
guages from a Iexical point of view, the expression tæma eitt-
hvert í eitthvert, literally ‘to empty something (a substance)
into something (a receptacle)’ is not unknown, although un-
mentioned in the dictionaries. A similar phenomenon may be
observed in English, especially in some of its colloquial varie-
ties. She emptied water into the pail and she emptied the
garbage are examples I have heard in colloquial American
English (Wisconsin).
The above remarks should suffice to prove that the sharp
lexical distinction between the notions of ‘pouring’ and ‘empty-
ing’, now prevalent in the standard Nordic languages, is largely
artificial and due partly to an etymological bias on the part
of our lexicographers, partly to the tendency towards more
logical precision in the literary languages. In unsophisticated
colloquial language the concepts of ‘pouring’ and ‘emptying’
are frequently both represented by the original word for
‘emptying’. If this development could take place in the Nordic
languages and, to some extent, also in English, it could just as