Sharpening, Confiding, and OE getryccad

Abstract

THE series of changes commonly known as Holtzmann's Law or sharpening has traditionally been described as follows: Intervocalic j w after short vowels show in many words strengthened articulation; we may represent the Germanic forms as jj ww…In West Germanic, the first part of the lengthened semi-vowel forms a diphthong with the preceding short vowel, but in Gothic and Norse it is narrowed to a stop [<ddj>, <ggj>, <ggv>].1 Thus, it may seem that analysing the effects of this process could be very rewarding for the scholar trying to identify the Norse-derived terms recorded in Old English texts. The contrast between OE trēow(i)an and OE <getryccað>, which renders L confidete ‘trust, confide’ in JnGl (Li) 16.33,2 would appear to offer a very good testing ground for the different results of these changes in West and North Germanic. The presence of the geminated consonant in the latter, together with the fact that the Aldredian glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels are not lacking in Norse-derived terms,3 could easily lead us to entertain the possibility that <getryccað> exhibits Norse influence (cp. ON tryggva ‘to make firm and trusty’). However, the stream of changes referred to by the umbrella-term sharpening is extremely problematic and this makes such a straightforward suggestion unconvincing.