Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.1970, Síða 92

100
Gaelic taom — a Norse loan?
easily take place in Gaelic. It is also possible, although hardly
probable, that O.N. tøma had already developed both mean-
ings when it was borrowed into Gaelic. All this implies that
Gaelic taom may be considered as a loan from O.N. tøm- from
the semantic point of view as well as from the formal one.
I do not, however, maintain that Gaelic taom is always a
borrowing from Norse. My hypothesis is that there are several
Gaelic word stems with the form taom-, and that one of them
is a borrowing from Norse. The English pair of homonyms
teem (1) and teem (2) suggests itself as a parallel. The first
teem ‘to be prolific or abundant; to be stocked to overflowing’
is hereditary Anglo-Saxon; the second, which is dialectal or
technical and means ‘to empty, to discharge, to pour out’ is
a borrowing from O.N. tøma.
In Gaelic we have, apparently, the following taom stems:
(a) Ir. taom, Sc.G. teum stands apart as the only case in
which the form of the word stem is fundamentally different
in the two Gaelic languages. Its verbal meanings are, as al-
ready mentioned, ‘to bite’ or ‘to snatch’; as a noun it means
‘a bite or morsel, portion (of), degree (of)’ (and, with a ne-
gating or privative particle, ‘[not or without] a scrap,
particle, jot’). There is no question of Norse influence here;
for a possible etymology of the word, see Holger Pedersen,
loc. cit. (footnote 7).
(b) Ir. and Sc.G. taom ‘a fit, a paroxysm, an attack’ (as of
feeling, passion, anger, or illness) cannot reasonably be
connected with Norse, although its origin is not clear.
(c) Ir. and Sc.G. taom ‘to empty, to bale, to pump; to
pour’ is the Norse loan (O.N. tøma) discussed above. Its
similarity to the Norse word, in form and meaning, is too
great to be incidental. Moreover, this taom and its derivatives14
seem to have their widest distribution in Scotland and the
northern districts of Ireland, where Norse linguistic influence
14 Especially Sc.G. taoman, Ir. taomán ‘baling vessel’ and Sc.G.
taomair, Ir. taomaire ‘a pump; a pumper’.