v.
Gaw past lyfte, lyft, pp. lyft; Pe pp. lyfte; Cl past pl. lyfte, pres. ptcp. lyftande, pp. lyfte; Erk pres. ptcp. lyftande; WA lyft, pres. 3 sg. liftis, lyftes, past pl. lift, liften, pp. lift, lyft, lifted, liftid
‘to lift, raise; build; extol, excite; make, pronounce’
(Modern English lift)Always derived from ON, cp. OIcel lyfta ‘to lift, raise’, a v. formed on the same PGmc root *luft- as the nouns represented by OIcel loft, OE lyft etc. ‘air, sky’ (see lofte). An unrecorded indigenous OE *lyftan (< *luftjan-) would be plausible, cp. the recorded MLG luchten, MHG lüften, and account well for ME lyfte, but the absence of such a v. in OE and its relatively late efflorescence in ME are arguments against adducing it. It is also not clear that a recent derivation on the ME n. lift, would have produced a v. with the right sense.
PGmc Ancestor
*luftjan-
Proposed ON Etymon (OIcel representative)
lyfta ‘to lift, raise’
(ONP lyfta (vb.))
Other Scandinavian Reflexes
Far lyfta, Icel lyfta, Norw lyfta, Dan løfte, Sw lyfta
OE Cognate
cp. lyft 'air, sky' (etc.)
Phonological and morphological markers
Summary category
C1ac
The earliest attestations recorded in MED are E (Orrm, Havelok), but it is common and widespread by the later 14c.
Occurrences in the Gersum Corpus
Gaw 12, 258, 369, etc.; Pe 567; Cl 443, 586, 717 etc.; Erk 178; WA 196, 674, 728 etc.
There is a disputed form at Gaw 1878: TGDn reads MS lyfte but emends for sense to lyste ‘hear’, and has been followed by most subsequent editors; though for an argument for retaining lyfte see Vantuono 1878n. Anderson (586n) observes that the sense 'to excite (emotion)' at Cl 586 is parallled by ON lyptask.