Re: [tied] Re: Torun´

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

From: tgpedersen

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2002 1:08 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: Torun´

> So it is! I kept looking for 'Thurn', not 'Thorn'. Given German <Turm>, Dutch <toren> (Da. <tårn>) I was surprised to learn that the knights spoke platt.

 

Why not? Torun' was a member of the Hansa from the very beginning, and Low Saxon was the Hanseatic lingua franca.

> Might we infer something about the timing of the first Germanic sound shift (Grimm),
ie. between 50 BCE and 531 CE? Of course the Tungri might have been Celticized after having been defeated, and þ- > t- is known eg. from the continental Scandinavian languages. But on the other hand no Roman author writes **Thungri?

 

50 BC (or later) is definitely too late for Grimm's Law. Tribal and personal names recorded about the beginning of the common era show its operation without a shadow of a doubt.

> ... But wasn't there a suggestion once that Verner came before Grimm, ie in this case first -t- > -d- (and then, by Grimm > -ð-)?

 

But Grimm's Law changes *d into /t/, not into /ð/. Grimm's and Verner's Laws, however, are in a "feeding" order, so you can't get the right results by reversing them. Remember that Verner's law is essentially fricative voicing (affecting also *s). If you propose that *t > *dH in a revised version of Verner's Law (and then *dH > ð~d), how can you unify it with the simple voicing *s > /z/? What has been discussed on the list is the possibility that Grimm's Law was a series of changes distibuted over a long period of time, rather than a single change, and that Verner's Law operated in its mid course. But at any rate Verner's Law must have taken place after the change of PIE voiceless stops into fricatives.

 

Piotr