délh₁-
“to recount, to count, to tell”Recount, count, tell
A PIE verbal root meaning "to recount, to reckon," continued in Germanic *talō ("number, reckoning, speech"), whence English tell (originally "to count"), tale ("a reckoning, a narrative"), teller (both narrator and bank counter), and talk. The semantic connection between counting and narrating is preserved in the dual meaning of tell.
Discussion
The root *délh₁- ("to recount, to count") is reconstructed from Old English tellan ("to count, to reckon, to narrate"), Old High German zellen ("to count, to tell"), Old Norse telja ("to count, to tell"), and possibly Greek dólos ("trickery") and Latin dolus ("guile"). Pokorny (IEW 193–194) discusses the root.
Old English tellan originally meant "to count, to reckon" before extending to "to narrate." This semantic duality survives in modern English: a bank teller counts money, while a storyteller recounts a narrative. The phrase "all told" preserves the counting sense.
The noun tale (Old English talu, "a counting, a number, a narrative") shows the same duality. Talk (Middle English talken, likely a frequentative of tell) represents the extension from "counting/recounting" to speech in general. Old High German zellen and German zählen ("to count") vs. erzählen ("to narrate") preserve the same semantic split.
Notes
gsc-gap: source of "tell", "tale", "talk", "tally"
Laryngeal Analysis
Contains *h₁; affects following vowel.
Ablaut
Full grade *delh₁-, zero grade *dl̥h₁-.