Re: Whitsuntide

On 2025-06-09, Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote:

German "Pfingsten" is also borrowed from medieval Latin "pentecoste"
or such, but heavily reshaped.

>
David Marjanović, a well-educated Austrian on languagehat.com, does not like
the DWB; I’m not sure why, I find it great, but then I’m not a native speaker,
let alone an educated native speaker.

Yes, David Marjanović's comments are always worth reading.
Personally, I don't like the DWB because I find it exasperatingly
difficult to read.

“A dative plural that was used as nominative and accusative plural (even as a
nominative singular) after the loss of the preceding prepositions, compare
Ostern, Weihnachten. Wulfila [c. 311-383, apostle to the Goths] took the greek
πεντεκοστή up as paintekustê, which in Kero [eighth century] with Germanization
of πέμπε became fimifchusti, and then in Middle High German with regular
shifting of the initial sound and contraction became phingeste, pfingst;

The entry is confusing, but those must be two independent developments
and separate forms:
- Greek > Gothic > germanized to OHG fimifchusti
- Greek (> Gothic?) > MHG pfingst with regular shift p > pf

Because you don't get to pf- from f-.

For anyone curious, the OED supports what my instinct suggested (but what is
not necessarily obvious to monolingual native speakers), that ‘whit’ was a
variant of ‘white’:

Presumably one of those instances where the vowel was shortened in
Middle English and then the Great Vowel Shift happened, compare
"wild, wilderness".

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de