v1.0
Published 01/10/24
fuine f. [ˈfũɲə], gen. idem, also fuineadh m. -[əɣ], gen. fuinidh -[i], ‘baking; kneading; a bake, a batch’ goes back to EG fuine f. ‘cooking, baking, roasting’ (eDIL˄), which Zimmer (1891, 159 fn 1) derives from ON funi m. ‘flame, fire, blaze’ (NO). Zimmer’s derivation is followed by Henderson (1910, 114; so also de Vries 1962); MacBain (1896) considers it unlikely, tentatively suggesting *voni- ‘dress’; Marstrander (1915a, 123) argues that EG fuine is older than the Viking Age and that ON funi would yield EG *funa; McDonald (2009, 355) considers it uncertain. Besides the fact that EG fuine and ON funi belong to different grammatical categories and are semantically dissimilar, EG fuine is simply the verbal noun of EG fo-noí ‘bakes, roasts, cooks’, the prototonic stem form of which (originally fon-, later fuin-) yields fuine as a feminine iā-stem, later fuineḋ m., by analogy with other verbal nouns in -eḋ/-aḋ, hence SG fuineadh (Pedersen 1913 II, 586; Thurneysen 1975, 446–47, 449; eDIL˄).
Cf. Ir. fuineadh m. ‘idem’. The variant Ir. fuine is also masculine: it is either a shortened form of fuineadh (m.) or directly from EG fuine (f.) but with a change of gender.