Re: Why there is t- in German tausend "thousand"?

> ---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <gprosti@...> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "regular system of diatopic variation", but if you have a
> set of words with a sufficient amount of shared phonetic material, plus matching
> semantics, this overrides the criterion of regular phonetic correspondence when drawing
> a connection between two or more forms.

Which itself can be overriden if the similarities can be shown to have divergent origins, of course. In this case that'd require a whole bunch of corroborating evidence for the model of forming numerals as "largest numeral not yet named", though. The best precedent I can think for anything along these lines is from the set-theoretical construction of ordinal numbers, a bit advanced for a supposed pre-HG origin :)

I'm going to wonder if analogy may be again at work, perhaps this time starting from the rather similar _Dutzend_. Does this have related /t/-initial forms that could have influenced the appearence of the same in _tausend_?

_j.