SC - steaks

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

Cariadoc wrote:
>Does this mean that the English words "steak" and "stake" ultimately
>come from the same ON source?


Yes, I suppose so - or probably rather from an even older source. The
following comes from Cupboard Love by Mark Morton.

"This Indo-European source - pronounced something like _stei_ and meaning to
pierce ... <snip a section about tigers> ... The Indo-European stei also
evolved into the Greek word _stigma,_ the name of a wound caused by a
piercing instrument. English adopted this word in the late sixteenth
century, eventually using it methaphorically to mean a mark of shame. As
well, _stei_ evolved through Germanic into the Old English _sticca,_ meaning
a stick, sticks being used, like arrows, to pierce things; by the thirteenth
century, _sticca_ had acquired a more familiar spelling, stick. And finally,
the Indo-European stei also evolved, again via Germanic, into the Old Norse
_stik,_ meaning stick; from this word, Old Norse derived _steik,_ the name
of a piece of meat impaled and cooked upon a stick, whic appeared in English
as steak in the fifteenth century."

Nanna

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