Re: NATLANG: Geramn /heil/?

On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 09:52 -0800, Joseph B. wrote:
> From what I can tell, /heil/ in German means both: "well-being" and
> "healed", and "holy" and "redemption"?
> Is this from convergence? or adaptation? or ??
Well, "health", "heal", "whole" (with an unetymological w-), "holy",
"hallow", "hail" ("~ Mary, full of grace", not frozen rain), the first
part of "holiday", the second of "wassail" etc. etc. etc. all derive
from the same Germanic root *hail- (with various affixes), though some
are re-borrowings from Old Norse. This diversity of meaning may go back
to the Indo-European era too, I don't know.

So I suppose mostly adaptation that mostly predates the German era.

(PS: I believe in German it's actually /hail/. If you intended to do
italics, the accept way to do that is with underscores, thus _heil_, to
avoid confusion with phonemic notation.)

--
Tristan

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