From: fournet.arnaud
Message: 57226
Date: 2008-04-13
----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
> ===============
>
> > I think the Grimm Shift was finished when proto-Germanic spread
>> west-ward.
> > What are the reasons to think otherwise ?
>http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/29016
>http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/54798
>The river names Tilia, Tamera and Tenera or Tanara, now Du. Dyle,
>Demer and Dender, and the city name Turnacum Tornacus, Fr. Tournay,
>Du. Doornijk (older Dorneke). Intermediate forms with Th- are
>documented in three of those cases: Thilia, Thenra and Thornaco.
>Meid has a example of Scandinavian Grimm-shifted river names with
>cognate Baltic non-shifted ones, but can't find it now.
Torsten
===========
It would be interesting to have this Baltic/Grimm shifted correspondances.
I'm rather chilly with place-names which can always be just look-alikes.
Arnaud
======
> I think the Grimm-shift in the expanding Germanic was a shibboleth
> against their para-Germanic cousins, possibly inspired by originally
> Iranian-speakers among them.
> Torsten
============
I would then hypothesize that pre-Grimm Germanic had the same consonant
system as Pre-Satem sanscrit,
with a vowel system close to that of Greek.
I don't believe in the shibboleth idea.
I would suggest that pre-Grimm Germanic when adopted by your beloved NWB
speakers was sortof transcoded into another phonological system.
This suggests the NWB system was : Voiced, unvoiced stop, unvoiced
fricative.
Phonological transcoding : pre-Grimm (*dh; *TH2 >) d > NWB-ized d ; (*d, *t?
>) ?t > t ; (*t, *TH1 >) t > th
It should also be noted that western PIE (Italic, Celtic) provides no
information about previous stress position.
Germanic - eastern ... - provides data (Verner).
When the phonological transcoding happened, this data was erased in the new
post-Grim Germanic.
We might hypothesized NWB had initial stress.
In that perspective, Grimm and Verner are not changes in a classical sense,
but reencoding by another speech community.
Next question, what does a non NWB-ized para-Germanic look like ?
Arnaud
===========