Re: Gmc. w-/g-, j-/g-

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <bm.brian@...> wrote:

>
> At 5:16:06 PM on Monday, December 19, 2011, dgkilday57 wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > 1. ON <bnere> 'rubbed'. Gothic <bnauan>, only attested
> > in the present, has the same formation as <bauan> 'to
> > dwell', OHG <bu:an>, to which <biruun> 3pl. pret. belongs.
> > Koebler reconstructs Gmc. *b(i)no:wwan as the pres. inf.
>
> Goth. *bnauan is actually attested only in the pres. part.,
> <bnauandans>, in Luke 6:1 in the Codex Argenteus. As it
> happens, ON <bnere> is also a hapax, occurring once in the
> third book of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great where
> another ms. apparently has <gnere>.

Then on the principle of "lectio difficilior", <bnere> is probably correct, but one copyist substituted the more common <gnere>. Without <bnauandans> we could dismiss <bnere> as an error.

> > 2. ON <gnere> 'rubbed'. If this is not modelled after
> > the foregoing, it likely belongs to the root cited by
> > Pokorny (IEW 436-7) as *gHne(:)u- 'nagen, kratzen, reiben'.
>
> > 3. ON <grera> 'greened up, grew'. Koebler reconstructs
> > Gmc. *gro:an, but the corresponding OE forms have /w/
> > throughout the paradigm.
>
> Which I believe is generally taken to have been a hiatus
> breaker in inflected forms that was reanalyzed as part of
> the stem.

Lehmann and others have already attacked this in connection with the OHG verbs. If this was Hiatustilgung, it would be all over the place, not restricted to a few preterit forms.

> > 4. ON <rera> 'rowed'. Usually considered reduplicated,
> > but again the OE forms have /w/ throughout.
>
> As above.
>
> > 5. ON <sera> 'sowed'. Usually considered reduplicated,
> > but Go. <saiso> shows that the pret. sg. did not voice the
> > root-anlaut.
>
> Verner's law alternations between voiced and voiceless
> fricatives in strong verbs were almost always leveled in
> favor of the voiceless variant in Gothic, so I'd interpret
> the evidence exactly the other way round: ON <sera> shows
> that it *did*. It's possible that the very marginal OHG and
> ON strong past -Vr- infixes began with reanalysis of the
> small handful of Vernerian variants that *weren't*
> immediately leveled. (This appears to be Ringe's view.)

Where would Gothic get a voiceless variant? The pret. pl. with presumed zero-grade has been dropped in favor of the pret. sg. stem; hence the pl. <saisoun>. The pret. sg. stem must have been originally voiceless, so the pre-shifted accent must have been on the reduplicator (at least in the sg.).

Again, if these /r/-preterits originated from reanalysis of shifted original */s/, in a random handful or two of verbs, the distribution should be random. The correlation with verbs having *-eXu- in the root is unexplained.

> [...]
>
> > 8. NU <leort> 'allowed'. Usually considered reduplicated
> > like <leolc> 'jumped', but the dissimilation required is
> > ad hoc.
>
> It's not common in OE, but it's quite common elsewhere.

As I noted elsewhere, <reord>, <leort>, and <on-dreord> belong to one subclass of verbs, and <leolc> and <heht> to another. I believe their formations are distinct: the three former are /r/-preterits, while the latter two are reduplicated.

DGK