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

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen
> To: cybalist@...
> 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

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> 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).
Out of curiosity: How can Turkish then get umlaut?

But (1) you can't have _subphonemic_ umlaut and u/e confusion at the
same time -- the phonetic distance is far too great;
Probably not, that why I propose separate stages.

(2) Herodotus (Hist. 5) does use the form Geta-, and that's fatal
enough for "Get- = Gut-".
>
> Piotr
>
You might well have had full umlaut, inasmuch as the means to denote
it (the small "e" above the vowel) wasn't invented until the middle
ages, and the need wasn't there as long as the following -i- that
caused the umlaut still persisted. Take the example of English -a-
and -i- today; it is nowhere indicated which variant of ä/eI and i/aI
to choose, and the language still seems to survive somehow.
As I recall, the -u- of *gut-, not -o-, rests on your reconstruction
of the word as related to PIE *gh-ud- "cast" (metal)?

If the vowel were -o- instead, we would only need to postulate an un-
rounding (Southern?) dialect (like English) to get from *göt-isk- to
*get-isk. As for timing, if we postulate that umlaut existed
immediately prior to the split-up of Germanic dialiects, we have
established a terminus ante quem only, and we have definitely not by
that disproved an earlier date.

Torsten