Re: Etymology of the Italian surname 'Brighenti'

> >>>> Pre-nasal raising (*e > *i / _NC) is distinct from
> >>>> i-umlaut of *e and occurs in all classes of words.
> >>>> (E.g., *kinnuz 'cheek' by way of *genwu- from *g^é:nu-s ~
> >>>> *g^énw- 'jaw'.) It must also be a relatively late change
> >>>> in pre-PGmc., in view of Finn. <rengas> 'ring' from a
> >>>> pre-stage of PGmc. *hringaz.
>
> [...]
>
> >>> But I think the *-en- > *-in- spread as hypercorrection
> >>> from those strong verbs being regularized, see
> >>> http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html
>
> >> Why? At best your fixation on shibboleths makes you a
> >> blind man claiming that an elephant is very like a rope.
>
> > The traditional explanation claims two separate rules
> > caused *-en- > -in- in 2,3sg, 'pre-nasal raising' and
> > umlaut; my explanation has no such causal overlap.
>
> The verbs *bindanã 'to tie', *helpanã 'to help' and *werpanã
> 'to throw' are all Class III strong verbs and started out
> with identical root vowel (*e) and identical conjugations,
> but only in the first was the *e of the root raised to *i
> throughout the present. You want analogy to extend i-umlaut
> of *e from words like *bindanã to completely unrelated words
> like *hringaz, but not to words like *helpanã; that's very
> implausible. It's much simpler to note that nasals have a
> tendency to raise preceding /e/ anyway, so that the observed
> change isn't particularly surprising; there's no need to
> invoke dubious psychological explanations. (And for all I
> know there may be other reasons to keep the two separate.)

You've gotten half of it, but you haven't quite thought it through.
What I claim is that in the class III verbs, analogy-leveling was done
in -en- verbs, not in the others, or rather, that, of all the 'faulty'
(by the then standard class III paradigm) levelings, those of the -en-
verbs survived (were preferred by those who mattered), the rest
didn't. In that period of uncertainty, -in- was substituted for -en-
also in other contexts by presumably the same people, or those who
wanted to emulate them.

> > Two rules causing the same one effect is a sign the theory
> > was designed wrong.
>
> Unless there really are two different things causing the
> same effect.

And the other examples are?

> Do you really imagine that the possibility of a single cause
> never occurred to someone who actually knew what he was
> doing?

Yes. Most people think like you do.

> I never cease to be astonished at the readiness of
> some dilettantes to assume that a couple of centuries' worth
> of experts missed the obvious instead of rejecting it for
> good reason.

I was going to add a word of comfort that I had a deep faith in you
that you would one day come up with an original thought of your own,
but having witnessed the process by which you weed them out, I realize
that would only have caused you discomfort.


Torsten