An Etymological Dictionary of the German Language/Annotated/gehen

by Friedrich Kluge

gehen, verb, ‘to go, walk, go on well, succeed,’ from the equivalent Middle High German and Old High German gên, gân (some of the inflected forms supplied by the stem gang; see Gang); compare Anglo-Saxon gân (stem gâ-, from gai), English to go, Old Swedish and Old Danish ga, ‘to go.’ The assumed root ghai-, meaning ‘to go,’ cannot be positively authenticated beyond the Teutonic group (yet compare Lettic gâju, ‘I went’?). The remarkable facts that this Teutonic gai, ‘to go,’ has no primitively noun derivatives in Teutonic, that it has supplanted the root i, which is widely diffused in Aryan, but almost obsolete in Teutonic (retained, however, in the Gothic aorist iddja, Anglo-Saxon eóde), and that like the latter it is conjugated like verbs in mi — all these lead to the supposition that the assumed Gothic *guim, *gais, *gaiþ are contracted from the verbal particle ga (see ge-) and the old inherited îmi, îsi, îti (compare Greek εἶμι, Sanscrit êmi, êši, êti), ‘to go.’ From this explanation it follows that gehen is fundamentally identical with Latin îre, Greek ἰέναι, Sanscrit root i, Lithuanian eíti. Old Slovenian iti, ‘to go’ (see eilen). For a similar blending of a verbal particle and an old verb compare folgen, fressen.