CLAIM / COUNTERCLAIM / LIMITRECORD 693
DISPUTE
RECORD.
One scholarly question. Every attached source. The present editorial state, without pretending the last word has been written.
openproposed
Was pursue the securely recovered basic meaning of the root?
No consensus is established. DWB calls hostile pursuit or persecution original inside the German history, while Pokorny’s account explicitly says the Germanic facts do not establish pursue as the root’s basic meaning.
WORD UNDER REVIEWDISPUTE 693
hazzōn
not directly recoverable · Old High German weak-verb citation form
An Old High German citation form in the inherited Germanic hate-verb family, printed beside hazzēn and spelling variants hazēn, hazōn, haʒʒēn, and haʒʒōn. Starling’s source record dates hazzēn to the eighth century and hazzōn to the ninth; Duden and Grimm’s DWB group the ēn and ōn forms in the history of German hassen. Corpus-wide research independently shows that some Old High German class-III ēn verbs also occur with class-II ōn forms, but the accessible abstract does not establish that hazzōn is one of its twenty repeatedly attested double forms. DWB reports haʒôn aligned with Latin aemulari and the forms hatamas and hatent with insequamur and insequuntur. Those reports support an action range involving following or hostile pursuit; they are not directly inspected manuscript tokens. Pokorny’s account, as transmitted by Starling, explicitly warns that the Germanic evidence does not prove “pursue” was the root’s basic meaning. The route therefore distinguishes the normalized headword, the combined historical variants, the reconstructed Germanic weak verb and noun family, the qualified Indo-European comparison, and the point where knowledge ends.
01DIRECT CLAIM EVIDENCE
2 SOURCES WITH A STANCE
A citation is not a vote. Each record says whether the work supports, challenges, contradicts, or contextualizes the position—and identifies the exact locus used.
SOURCE 01supportshistorical dictionary
Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm — hassen
Publishes hostile pursuit or persecution as the original branch meaning.
hassen, verb, sense 1- AUTHOR / EDITOR
- Jacob Grimm · Wilhelm Grimm · DWDS editorial team
- YEAR
- 2026
- PUBLISHER
- Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences
SOURCE 02challengescomparative database
Proto-Germanic *xatiz, *xatōn-, -ēn- and *xatjan-
Explicitly says Germanic evidence does not establish pursue as the root’s basic meaning.
Pokorny discussion: Germanic evidence and the proposed pursue base- AUTHOR / EDITOR
- StarLing database editors
- YEAR
- Not recorded
- PUBLISHER
- StarLing
02 / EDITORIAL STATE
THE QUESTION REMAINS OPEN.
- CONFIDENCE
- proposed
- STATUS
- open
- LEGACY SOURCE SUMMARY
- The reviewed scholarship contains a direct branch-level claim and a direct comparative caution.
WHY NO RESOLUTIONThe reviewed evidence does not yet warrant collapsing the competing or incomplete analyses into one secure answer.