Re: [tied] German "ge-" before participe perfect

On Wed, 06 Aug 2003 11:46:00 +0200, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

>05-08-03 11:00, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>
>> Even though my German etymological dictionary explicitly denies it, the
>> connection of Germanic *ga- with PIE *k^om- as an unstressed Verner variant
>> is usually accepted.
>
>There's nothing problematic about pre-Gmc. *k(^)om- > *xan- > *xa- >
>*ga- if we admit the possibility that the prefix behaved differently
>from initial syllables in lexical roots (there was a small discussion of
>that on Cybalist some time ago; I argued that already in pre-Vernerian
>times roots had some kind of demarcative secondary stress on the initial
>syllable). The full form *xan- can perhaps be found in *xanso: 'cohort,
>troop, guild' (Goth./OHG hansa, OE ho:s, Finn. kansa 'people, nation' [a
>loan from Gmc.]), if it reflects participial *kontsta: < *kom-dH(h1)tah2
>from *kom-dHeh1- 'establish' (or the like), cf. Lat. condere.

Kluge/Mitzka ('57), which is the etymological dictionary I was referring
to, rather weakly connects ge- with Skt. jabha:ra "gebar", Osc. ce-bnust
("lies: ge-bnust") "er wird hergekommen sein". The development PIE *g > Gmc
/g/ is blamed on the Stellung in unbetonter Vorsilbe, which doesn't make
much sense: if they're appealing to a special development in unstressed
position, what's wrong with a derivation from *kom-, where the soundlaw to
appeal to is a proven one like Verner's? The only objection I can imagine
to a development *kom- > ga- is why we fail to see the same thing in other
preverbs, such as ver- (*fer-).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...