Re: [tied] Re: Wuz

At 5:54:00 AM on Friday, July 23, 2004, tgpedersen wrote:

> Old Danish and Old Swedish has a neuter _tu_, surviving in
> Da.,Sw. '(slå) itu' "(break) in two, destroy". It is _not_
> Old Norse (_tvau_ n.). Perhaps the English spell a
> masculine, but pronounce a neuter?

The OE masc. is <twe:gen>; <tu:> and <twa:> are both neuter.
OE <tu:> did in fact survive at least into the 17th century,
becoming <tow>; if we were pronouncing it today, the word
for 2 would presumably rhyme with <cow>.

> BTW I noticed that Skt. _vastu-_ "town" supposedly is a
> cognate of Latin _astus_ "skill". What's this loss of v-
> in Latin?

I believe that the suggestion is that <astus> may derive
from Gk. <astu> 'town', in which case the *w- was lost
already in Greek.

Brian