Reconstruction talk:Proto-Indo-European/nem-
Old Irish nem[edit]
“Unsorted formations” currently lists:
- Old Irish: nem (“gift”)
which puzzled me greatly because I could not find the word anywhere. In fact, it turns out that it comes from the German original of Pokorny which lists:
- air. nem f., mir. neim ‘Gift’
‘Gift’ being the German for ‘poison’, but this has been mistakenly rendered in English as ‘gift’. a mistake also made by the LRC.
If anything, the word should be listed as:
- Old Irish: neim (“poison”)
which already has a Wiktionary entry.
But I think it would probably be better omitted altogether. The idea that Old Irish neim ‘poison’ originally meant ‘gift’ and moved from there, like German Gift, to mean ‘poison’ is just speculation by Pokorny, and is rejected by Lexique Étymologique de l’Irlandais Ancien (1960), which says “On a imaginé un prototype *nemos « prise » de même racine que got. niman « prendre », etc., en comparant all. gift « poison » à geben « donner » ; mais la comparaison n’est pas valable et l’hypothèse est à rejeter, malgré Pok. 763.” Unless anyone knows of any more recent work which confirms things one way or the other... ?