Etymology
A development of the commonplace Gmc v. as in OE
hātan ‘to command, direct, bid, order; summon; vow, promise; name, call’ and OIcel
heita ‘to call, name, promise’ (cp. further Go
háitan, OFris
hē
ta, OS
hē
tan, OHG
heizan (< PGmc *
haitan-). ME spellings of the pres. stem in <e> are almost always explained as showing /e:/ levelled from the OE pret. stem variant
hē
t- (so
OED,
MED, TG(D) and GDS), and the word is missing from all standard treatments of ON infl. (inc. Bj. and McGee). The sole dissenting voice is Emerson (1927: 819–20), who points out that the usual Angl. form of the pret. stem was the fossilized reduplicating variant
heht-, and hence finds it ‘unthinkable’ that the pres. stem in the dialect of the
Gaw-manuscript should show influence from the pret. stem
hēt- historically proper only to southern English (WS) (on the OE occurrences of pret.
heht- see esp. Hogg-Fulk §6.71) and argues therefore that
hete is a borrowing of the ON v. represented by OIcel
heita, in a form showing OEN monophthongization. But this change is never demonstrably attested in Norse-derived vocabulary in the
Gaw (we should expect <ay> from VAN /ɑi/, /ɛi/), and there is no very strong reason to doubt the traditional explanation for the <e> in
hete. Notice that, though the pret. sg. in
Gaw is usually the Angl.-type variant
hyʒt (e.g.
Gaw 1966, 1970), there is a pret. 2 sg <hettez> at
Gaw 448 whose vowel must descend from the WS-type pret.; and the transfer of originally pret. forms to the pres. stem certainly occurred to produce the ME
hight- pres. type (see
OED’s Forms under 1γ).
PGmc Ancestor
*haitan-
Proposed ON Etymon (OIcel representative)
heita ‘to call, name, promise’
(ONP heita (3) (vb.))
Other Scandinavian Reflexes
Far heita, Icel heita, Norw heita, runic Dan haite, haitika, Dan hede, hedde, runic Sw ha[i]teka, Sw heta, hetta
OE Cognate
hātan ‘to command, direct, bid, order; summon; vow, promise; name, call’
Phonological and morphological markers
Summary category
CCC2