Re: Carmina Burana

On 2025-05-30, guido wugi <wugi@brol.invalid> wrote:

When did "gan" (nl. gaan) become "gehen"?

"Gān" and "gēn" have been variants since Old High German times.
I guess "gēn" won out eventually and "gehen" appears to be an
unetymological attempt to regularize the spelling.

| The form gēn appears early on in Bavarian, later spreading to
| eastern and southern Franconian and to the newly developing East
| Central German. Its origins are unknown. One theory invokes the
| original paradigm of Proto-West Germanic *gān, which had *ai in
| the 2nd and 3rd persons singular of the present; compare Middle
| Low German gân > he geit, modern Colognian jonn > hä jeiht, etc.
| The Old High German ē might thus be explained as a compromise
| vowel between ā and ei. What lends credence to this theory is the
| fact that Old High German ē cannot have developed regularly in
| the given position, as it only occurs before h, r, w, and
| word-finally.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gen#Old_High_German
(No source given, but sounds sensible.)

The preterite and past participle are from a different verb "gangan".
https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/gehen

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