Re: [tied] Re: "Getisk," said the Get, but nobody did not hear him.

Inconspicuous allophonic fronting of back vowels, anticipating phonemic umlaut, may well have begun rather early (but certainly after the establishment of initial stress, since Germanic umlaut is a prosodically motivated process). But (1) you can't have _subphonemic_ umlaut and u/e confusion at the same time -- the phonetic distance is far too great; (2) Herodotus (Hist. 5) does use the form Geta-, and that's fatal enough for "Get- = Gut-".

Piotr

----- Original Message -----

From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, December 07, 2001 11:31 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: "Getisk," said the Get, but nobody did not hear him.

Thank you for the diagnosis, mr. Vet. Since umlaut occurs in all Germanic languages, many have proposed that began in Prto-Germanic (although unrecorded since non-phonemic as long as the following -i- that caused it was still there). And then we're back in Strabo's (although not Herodotus') time. Torsten