balk

Verb

Middle English balkyn "to leave an unplowed ridge between furrows, omit, neglect," verbal derivative of balk, balke "strip of unplowed land between fields" — more at balk entry 2

Noun

Middle English balk, balke, bauke "squared beam of wood, beam of a balance from which pans hang, strip of unplowed land between fields, ridge between furrows left unplowed," going back to Old English balca "strip of unplowed land between fields, ridge between furrows left unplowed," going back to Germanic *balkōn (masculine n-stem) "beam," (whence also Old Frisian balka "beam," Old Saxon balko, Old High German balko, balcho "beam, winepress, gangway on a ship"; with differing ablaut and/or inflection Old English bolca "deck, gangway on a ship," Old High German bolkun [plural] "passageway on a ship," Old Icelandic bǫlkr, balkr "partition, section," bjalki "beam"), going back to dialectal Indo-European *b^holǵ- or *b^holǵ^h-, whence also regional Russian bólozno "thick board," Slovene blazína "load-bearing beam in a roof or threshing floor," Lithuanian balžíena "flexible crosspiece for securing the back support on a sled"

Note: G. Kroonen prefers *b^holǵ^h- to *b^holǵ- because a plain voiced stop should have triggered lengthening and acute accent in Balto-Slavic ("Winter's Law"). Aspirated *b^holǵ^h-, however, would result in a voiced rather than voiceless stop in Germanic, a problem that Kroonen circumvents by assuming that -k- in *balkan- reflects a voiceless geminate stop produced by assimilation of a voiced stop and a following *n ("Kluge's Law")—hence an original genitive form *b^hl̥ǵ^h-n-ós would result in *bulkkaz. (See Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic [Leiden, 2013] s.v. *belkan- and The Proto-Germanic N-Stems [Amsterdam/New York, 2011], pp. 148-49.) — A variety of other formations have been assigned to this Indo-European base: 1) Latin sufflāmen "bar used for braking wheeled vehicles," allegedly from *sub-flăg-men, in the notation of A. L. Lloyd et al., Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Althochdeutschen (vol. 1, p. 442), *-b^hlьg-mn̥ or *-b^hlьg-smn̥. But a deverbal derivation is suggested by the prefix, and -men derivatives in Latin are almost without exception formed from verbs. 2) Greek phalang-, phálanx "log, roller placed under loads or a ship, spar, row, rank, body of troops drawn up in ranks" (see phalanx). Earlier literature uniformly assigns this word to *b^hl̥ǵ- "beam," with the addition of a laryngeal that drops elsewhere and a "secondary" nasal consonant—hence *b^hol-ə₂-g- in Chantraine's notation. R. Beekes, however, regards all -ang-/-ing-/-yng- derivatives, most etymologically opaque, as of pre-Greek substratal origin (Etymological Dictionary of Greek, Brill, 2010); see also note at pharynx.