The Rivalry between the Gan-Group and the Faran-group

One of the most influential factors in semantic change is rivalry among synonyms. Owing to the alliterative verse style and the frequent rendering for Latin vocabulary, Old English has abundant supplies of synonyms for alliteration, variation, and repetitive word pairs. Among verbs of motion we find not so many verbs denoting ‘to come’ but many verbs that mean ‘to go’. Verbs of going can be divided into two groups, i.e. the gan-group and the faran-group. The former includes gan, gangan, geonga (Li), gegan, and other prefixed cognates (like ingan and utgan), while the latter contains faran and feran, together with their prefixed cognates (like infaran and oferferan).

This rivalry is a matter of lexical preference. In poetry, gangan, faran, gan, feran, gegan, geferan and gefaran occur in descending order of frequency. If they are rearranged in descending order of alliterating ratio, first comes gegan (which alliterates 18 times out of 23 occurrences, i.e. 78.3%), and then feran (48 out of 74, i.e. 64.9%), gefaran (5 out of 8, i.e. 62.5%), faran (49 out of 110, i.e. 44.5%), gangan (71 out of 178, i.e. 39.9%), geferan (3 out of 10, i.e. 30.0%), and gan (20 out of 99, i.e. 20.2%). Not all the ge-prefixed verbs denote motion, but gegan may mean ‘to conquer’, gefaran ‘to attack’, and geferan ‘to undergo’ at times.