--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen@...
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2001 11:11 AM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Ingvar and Ivar
>
>
Torsten:
> > The existence of two stems <zan>/<zand> in Old High German
intrigues me. Are they somehow correlated statistically with
nominative/the oblique cases, such that <zan> is preferred in the
nominative and <zand> in the oblique ones (and nominative plural)?
>
>
Piotr:
I'm not a specialist in OHG, but I have friends who are, so I can
make inquiries if necessary. My impression is that <zand> and <zan>
are just free variants. Zand survives in German dialects and, e.g.,
in Letzeburgesch. I see no reason to regard this d-loss as more
puzzling than the reduction of "kind friend" to "kine fren" in
colloquial or regional English. The fact that this particular
simplification is not often reflected in the spelling doesn't make it
less trivial. English-speakers do it all the time, though there are
only a few examples of -nd > -n perpetuated orthographically (but
there are some, e.g. ME launde > lawn).
Torsten:
Inneresting, as you would say. Does that mean that a proper linguist
should distinguish rigidly between two kinds of rules, normal and
banal/non-puzzling/trivial?
Piotr:
> What old nominative would <zan> reflect, anyway? The one you quoted
(*do:n) is academic fiction supported by respectable but
Hellenocentric IEists like Szemerényi (based on the analysis of Greek
present participles, though even in Greek we find odous < *odons <
*odonts). Even if *do:n were real, however, a form like <zan> could
not be derived from it -- the vocalism is wrong. Actually, most
comparative evidence points to PIE Nom.sg. *h1donts, with later
branch-specific treatment of the affricate [ts].
Torsten:
The comparative evidence for the prothetic H1, AFAIK, comes from the
desire to see the "tooth" as an "eater", thus a -nt- participle of
*H1-d- 'eat', and another desire to account for the Greek prothetic
vowel o-. This means trouble trying to derive H1 > o (bad!).
How about NomSg *H1édon-, AccSg *H1edént- (or even *H1odént-?) (in
conformity with the priciple of stressed /e/ and unstressed /o/) and
then the general ensuing paradigmatic confusion providing Greek o-
and also (by paradigm levelling) accounting for Greek -o- and Latin -
e- in the stem?
Piotr:
For Proto-Germanic, one would expect Nom.sg. *tans, Acc.sg. *tanTum,
Gen.sg. *tunTs (Germanic innovation), Dat.sg. tundi: (Verner's Law
applies), Nom.pl. tanTiz, etc. One could perhaps make a case for OHG
zan < *tans, but as there is no other evidence for the faithful
preservation of root nominatives in Germanic, this smacks of fantasy,
and a more down-to-earth explanation is preferable, IMO.
Torsten:
IMO, I believe, stands for "in my opinion".
As I understand you the down-to-earth explanation
*tans > *tanTs (*tanTus?)> zand > zan
should be preferred to
*tans > zan
because the latter smacks of fantasy?
>
Piotr:
> Gothic retains traces of the zero grade (unfortunately, without
Vernerian alternations, and the attested forms add up to only a
fragment of the paradigm). It seems that a u-stem arose in Gothic due
to the reanalysis of Acc.sg. *tanT-un (< *dont-m) and Acc.pl. *tunT-
unz (= Gothic tunTuns < *dnt-ns). The generalistion of weak vocalism
is untypical here, as is the complete switch to the u-declension, but
the _partial_ replacement of root stems by u-forms is otherwise well
evidenced in Germanic (cf. Gothic fo:tus 'foot' for "expected" *fo:s,
but also OE hnutu 'nut', pl. hnyte < *xnut-u-z, *hnut-iz, or Old
Icelandic u-umlaut in the "tooth" word: tönn- < *tanTu-). To sum up,
Germanic languages often generalised the vocalism of the Nom.sg., but
repaired the irregular Auslaut of that form by inserting a
dummy "buffer vowel" (*-u-) after the stem-final consonant. For these
reasons one would expect the Proto-NW-Germanic "tooth" pradigm to
have the following forms: Nom.sg. *tanT-u-z, Acc. *tanT-u-n, Gen.sg.
*tanT-s, Nom.p. tanT-iz, etc.
>
> Piotr
BTW, is this the split-up of ProtoGermanic you advocate:
ProtoGermanic > Proto-NW-Germanic and Proto-East-Germanic?
Actually, what I wanted to do was to argue for the existence
of "difficult" alternating stems in ProtoGermanic (in Polish they
have <ruka>/<w ruce>, in case you didn't know:) Most sensible Slav
languages have obliterated that). This would make life easier for my
proposed Nom. *dan-/Obl. *tan- stem. But you have admittted the
existence of such stems so that obstacle seems out of the way now.
Torsten