Re: [tied] Re: "Getisk," said the Get, but nobody did not hear him.

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 11736
Date: 2001-12-08

The variation of short u/o was allophonic in early Germanic. To be more precise, *u was lowered to [o] in some positions, and Proto-Germanic had no *o phoneme. The lowering was conditioned by the presence of *a in the next syllable, so it would not have taken place in *gutiska-. Some of the earliest records of the Goths' ethnonym have <gut->, so it doesn't rest on my inferences.

Piotr
 
----- Original Message -----
From: tgpedersen
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 1:05 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: "Getisk," said the Get, but nobody did not hear him.

> You might well have had full umlaut, inasmuch as the means to denote it (the small "e" above the vowel) wasn't invented until the middle
ages, and the need wasn't there as long as the following -i- that
caused the umlaut still persisted. Take the example of English -a-
and -i- today; it is nowhere indicated which variant of รค/eI and i/aI
to choose, and the language still seems to survive somehow.
As I recall, the -u- of *gut-, not -o-, rests on your reconstruction
of the word as related to PIE *gh-ud- "cast" (metal)? ...