Re: [tied] nominative plural

See also the current thread on Proto-Germanic declensions.


On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 00:56:49 +0100, Richard Wordingham
<richard@...> wrote:

>As Proto-Germanic did not distinguish /o/ and /a/, long or short, I would
>expect it to be [O] (as English 'awe').

It's true that Germanic merged PIE *a (*&) and *o as PGmc *a, and *a:
(*eh2) and *o: (*eh3) as PGmc *o:, so that strictly speaking there's no
need to mark the length on *o:. However, short *o arose shortly afterwards
(e.g. from *u when *a followed in the next syllable), and is consistently
distinguished from long *o:.

>The /z/ was almost certainly
>originally /s/ - presumably voiced by Verner's law. Miguel argues that it
>was originally [t'] (soft t), but that was before Proto-IE.

Actually, that it was labialized *tW, which became *-sW in the Auslaut (*tW

> *sW is a not uncommon soundlaw, known e.g. from Japanese and Greek). In

Armenian, *tW, *sW and *kW give <k`> (/kh/), which is also the nom.pl.
ending (e.g. <k`ork`> "sisters" < *swesoresW). Note that plain *-s gives
-0:

PIE Arm
*sWV- k`V-
*-VsWV- -V0V- > -V-
*-VsW -(V)k`

*sV- (h)V-
*-VsV- -V0V- > -V-
*-Vs/*-Vz -(V)

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...