v. (wk.)
Gaw past blenked; WA past pl. blenkid
'to look; gleam'
(Modern English blenk)A reflex of a PGmc *ƀlankjan-, for which cp. OIcel blekkja ‘to deceive, betray, seduce’ (< *blenkja) and OE blencan ‘to deceive, cheat’, which is most likely derived from the related adj. PGmc *ƀlanka- to which Heid. attributes an original sense ‘shining weakly’ and a dual development to either ‘bright, white’ or ‘pale, dark’ in the Gmc languages, cp. OIcel blakkr ‘pale, dark’, MLG, OHG blanc ‘shining, white’ and probably OE poetic blanca ‘(shining or white) horse’. The wk. v. could then originally have had a literal sense (as does Norw blekkja) ‘to glisten, shine’, and developed via ‘to blind’ towards ‘to deceive’ (etc.) as in OIcel and OE. The non-palatalized ME variant in -nk has often been straightforwardly explained as a loan from ON (though non-initial palatals may not be a secure test) (thus TGD, GDS, MED). But the sense ‘to gleam’ is not attested in either OE or ON: it may represent an unrecorded native or early Scandinavian sense (perhaps surviving in Norw blekkja), or perhaps (as OED carefully suggests) the influence of an etymologically-related v. like ME blinken, PDE blink.
PGmc Ancestor
*ƀlankjan-
Proposed ON Etymon (OIcel representative)
blekkja ‘to deceive, betray, seduce’; cp. blakkr (adj.) ‘pale, dark’
(ONP blekkja (vb.))
Other Scandinavian Reflexes
Icel blekkja, Norw blekkja
OE Cognate
blencan ‘to deceive, cheat’; cp. blanca n. ‘(shining or white) horse’
Phonological and morphological markers
[absence of palatalization of */k/] (possibly diagnostic)
Summary category
CC2c
MED’s examples of spellings in <enk, enc> are mainly N and E, with exceptions (SJ.B , and as a variant in c1325(c1300) Glo.Chron.A). In various MnE dial in Sc., Ire. and N/EM.
Occurrences in the Gersum Corpus
Gaw 799, 2315; WA 5607