DISGUISED COMPOUNDS IN OLD-ENGLISH

HENRY SWEET
1880 Anglia. Zeitschrift für englische Philologie  
It has long been suspected that fultum is a compound of full with some other word, but, as far as I know, nothing more satisfactory has as yet been proposed than Grimm's full + dom, with an inexplicable change of d to t. His derivation is made still more improbable by the form fulteman of the verb, which is very common in the older texts (Pastoral 233. 8, 305. 4. Vesp. Psalms 88. 44) and is the only one in the oldest of all English texts, the Epinal glossary, which has fultemendi, fultemendum,
more » ... hese readings being supported by the Erfurt and Corpus texts. From these data I conjectured that fultum might be a compound of full and team, through an intermediate fultem whose short vowel was assimilated to the root one. I brought forward this view in a paper I read before the Philological society, but it was almost unanimously rejected by my hearers. I was, therefore, rather pleased to find the gloss emolomentum, fulteam in the Erfurt glossary. Π. sulung. The word sulung is peculiar to the Kentish Charters, where it expresses apparently some measure of land, like the ordinary /urlang. The form sulong (Kemble I 238) suggests composition with lang, and as fur(ti)lang = 'furrow-length', sulung or sulang may be sulh-lang = 'plough-length', which comes to the same thing. We have here the same 'vowel-harmony' as in fultum. A common variation of sulung is srvulung, for which it is superfluous to give references, pointing to a older *srvulg for sulg. We might also assume *srvelg were it not for the dative sylg (Past. 403. 2) and plural syll (JElfric's Horn. II 450.6), Brought to you by |
doi:10.1515/angl.1880.1880.3.151 fatcat:k3gypvw6hzfuhnsu6icjxypjbq