Lexember Day 13 - thirteen times

Today, in honour of the 13ᵗʰ day of Lexember, I bring you an old word with a new twist. 

The word is missing from the Gothic corpus, but there is sufficient evidence to believe it was either *þritaihun or *þrijataihun, the equivalents of which were likely both present in Griutungi as *þritehun and *þrijatehun. But Gothic also had an alphabetic number system, inspired by the Greek, and in this system, the numeral 13 was rendered as ·ig· and this system continued to be used throughout Old Valthungian. In Middle Valthungian, likely starting jocularly, certain numerals which formed pronounceable words began to be “spoken” in place of their linguistic equivalents, and ig was one of them. 

Word games also developed with some of the numbers, and we also see the reverse process happening, resulting in words like fiðrahunda þrižatǣn – literally ‘four hundred thirteen’ – coming to be a slang term for ‘road, highway’, as 413 in Gothic numerals is ·wig·, which is also the accusative of wiǧ ‘road’.

For a while in Middle Valthungian, three words for ‘13’ existed in somewhat free variation: þrizjatæn being the most “correct,” þrîtæn the most common, and ig the most informal. In the transition to Early Modern Valthungian, however,  a metrical change took place in the language and caused many words with two adjacent stressed syllables to get an epenthetic vowel. Indeed, this led to the brief existence of “þrîatæn,” but it quickly fell out of use leaving only the formal þrižatǣn and the informal ig. It wasn’t long before someone smushed the two together, and þrigatǣn eventually became the most popular of the three options. (The other two are still in use, but þrigatǣn is vastly preferred.)

In case that all sounds like a lot to swallow, note that something very similar also happened to nineteen, where the very awkward-sounding njuntǣn or njunatǣn and iþ merged to give us niðatǣn; in this case, however, njunatǣn has fallen out of use completely.

The final element of this story is the suffix ‑þis, which from a distance looks like a simple ordinal or genitive, but is no such thing at all. It is derived from the Griutungi *þīhs (Gothic þeihs), which also exists as the independent word þīfs ‘time, occurrence’, which supplanted earlier *sinþam ‘times’ among the adverbialized numbers.

Anyway, Happy Friday the 13ᵗʰ of Lexember!