From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 8199
Date: 2001-07-31
----- Original Message -----From: tgpedersen@...Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2001 12:43 PMSubject: [tied] Re: kuningas <-> knyaz> ... what is the -k- doing in Dutch "koninklijk"? Verner?No, just word-internal sandhi. While we're at it, Verner's Law can produce alternations like -h : -g, but not -k : -g.
> And how old is the name Helsinge (obviously Germanic) then?I don't know for sure, but I think Scandinavian X-ing(e) is more or less the same formation as German X-ing(e) and English X-ing(s) (OE X-ingas), with the suffix added to a personal name and the placeneme referring to "people of X". My guess is *Hals-ing- "(village inhabited by) people of someone whose nickname was Hals)", but I may be wrong. This type of placename formation is archaic in Britain and in Germany, and presumably also in Scandinavia.> I know that the Finno-Ugricists call it consonant gradation, but has anyone ever tried to explain it as derived from a Verner-type law operating on a stress-shifting language? The non-Baltic Fennic languages do not have initial stress AFAIK (or is it some of the Ugric ones?).Consonant gradation -- which is an incredibly complex but thoroughly investigated phenomenon -- has to do with the distinction between closed and open syllables in Proto-Baltic-Finnic (now "fossilised" as a rule of morphophonemic alternation, applied also to loanwords), not with the location of stress, which has always been initial in that group. Initial stress is also reconstructed for the Proto-Finnic and Proto-Finno-Ugric stages as well (Hungarian, for example, is initially stressed). Individual languages may have developed innovative stress systems, but all comparative evidence points to initial stress as far back as Proto-Uralic.Piotr