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I am looking for a particular linguistic term for this process of turning nouns like food into verbs like feed. For all I know, it may be older than English, perhaps even going back all the way to OE.

English has a bunch of noun-verb pairs like these:

food, feed
blood, bleed
brood, breed
doom, deem?

What is going on there? What does it mean?

nastenka
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    Look up I-mutation, Umlaut and Indo-European Ablaut. – Decapitated Soul Jul 17 '20 at 11:18
  • Note that feed and breed are also nouns. I am not convinced that brood and breed are connected, nor doom/deem. – Weather Vane Jul 17 '20 at 11:20
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    Looking at etymonline, this goes back to Proto-Germanic, where one of these pairs of words had a palatalized ccnsonant ending the first syllable (i.e., fodon and fodjan). This palatalization eventually disappeared, but it seems to have raised the vowel before it. One wonders whether this happened with other vowels, as well. – Peter Shor Jul 17 '20 at 11:44
  • And it seems likely that the different vowels in foot/feet also arose because the following palatalized consonant raised the vowel. In Proto-West Germanic, foot and feet were fōt and fōti – Peter Shor Jul 17 '20 at 11:54

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