tēkaną – Proto-Germanic verb conjugation

Active Voice

Passive Voice

Participles

Present	tēkandz
Past	tēkanaz

Etymology

1. From an apparent Proto-Indo-European *deh₁g- (“to touch”), with the only formal cognate being Tocharian B täk- (“to touch, feel (with the hand); to fetch”), ceśäṃ (“touches; takes”, 3sg.pres.). Ringe suggests that either pre-Germanic or pre-Tocharian borrowed the word from the other.
2. Several authors have noted the similarity of this root to Proto-Indo-European *teh₂g- (“to touch, take (by the hand)”) (whence *þakkōną (“to touch lightly, tap”), Latin tangō (“I touch”), Ancient Greek τεταγών (tetagṓn, “having seized”, ptcp.)), but the two cannot be reconciled by traditional means, as the "unshifted" Germanic *t is not expected to come from PIE *t in this phonetic environment, nor should Germanic *ē (as in the Gothic descendant only) have developed from PIE *eh₂, and Tocharian short *ä cannot continue PIE *eh₂ under normal conditions. However, the stop consonant in Germanic can be explained if it developed from a cluster *dg with voicing assimilation from earlier *tg. According to the hypothesis by Mottausch, the reduplicated form *te-th₂g- (as in Latin tetigī (“have touched”), Ancient Greek τεταγών (tetagṓn)) regularly lost its laryngeal in pre-Germanic, and so the resulting *te-tg- would have required voicing assimilation to *te-dg-, which was subsequently back-formed to *de-dg- to restore the normal pattern of reduplication, resulting in the unshifted Germanic /t/. Additionally, the pre-form *deh₁g- that resulted in the long vowel in Germanic can be maintained, if it is assumed that the second stop in this pre-Germanic *dedg- underwent dissimilation to glottalic *h₁ = [ʔ]. Kroonen upholds this derivation, though he notes its great difficulties. For a partial alternative, he suggests a back-formation of *tēkaną from iterative *þakkōną (cf. his similar derivation of *slēpaną from *slapp/bōną). See: Latin 'tangō'.

Verbs referencing "tēkaną"

English take, Scots tak, Dutch taken, Middle English taken, Norwegian ta, Norwegian, nynorsk ta, Swedish ta, Faroese taka, Icelandic taka, Norwegian, nynorsk taka, Old Swedish taka, Old English tacan, Danish tage.

Cognates

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