On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 08:58:08 +0000, tgpedersen <
tgpedersen@...>
wrote:
>> Look up Verner's law.
>
>I looked it up in Collinge's "The laws of Indo-European" (85). At
>least according to him, the whole metter isn't settled yet.
Nothing is settled according to Collinge... that's just the style of the
book. What's settled is that the output of *p, *t, *k in Verner position
is indistinguishable from the outout of PIE *bh, *dh, *gh.
>> >Where does that come from? Why detour over
>> >*b? PIE *p > PGmc *b > ON, OE f, changing two features in the last
>> >change, when you could go PIE *p > PGmc *f > Verner PGmc *v > ON,
>> >OE -*f? At least ON -f was pronounced -v, and the Scandinavian
>> >languages now write -v- for ON (and older Da, Sw) -f-. I suspect
>> >that idea comes from a German, but German is the odd one out here
>> >with *b.
>>
>> There is no PGmc *v. There is only *b (from PIE *bh or *p
>> [Verner]), with allophonic distribution: [b] in initial position and
>> after /m/; [B] elsewhere (i.e. the exact same allophonic ditribution
>> we find in the Spanish phoneme /b/). Intervocalic *-b- is written <b>
>> in Gothic, OHG and OS, while it's obvious that ON, OE and Dutch -f-
>> (-v-), i.e. merger with the reflex of PGmc *f in that position, is
>> secondary.
>
>Would you care to explain? It's not obvious to me.
We know that PIE had three series of stops (*p, *bh, *b: voiceless, voiced
aspirated and voiced unaspirated [*b, unlike *d, *g, *gW, *g^, being rather
rare]). From the mutual comparison of the Germanic languages, we know that
Proto-Germanic also had three kinds of obstruents (*f, *b, *p: voiceless
fricative, voiced and voiceless). Comparing with the other IE lgs., we see
that these largely correspond to PIE *p, *bh and *b, except that Verner's
law causes some instances of *p to behave as *bh.
It follows that Gothic and OHG preserve the original state of affairs,
because they distinguish *f from *b from *p in most positions (in Gothic *f
and *b merge when followed by voicelessness). It also follows that the
situation we find e.g. ON, OE, where medially only two phonemes (-f-, -p-)
are distinguished [disregarding the geminates -ff-, (-pp-) and -bb-] cannot
be ancient, and that -f- represents the secondary merger of intervocalic
*-f- and *-b-. To maintain the opposite, that Proto-Germanic only had
*-f-, and that it just happened to split along etymogical lines into Gothic
and German *-f- and *-b-, would plainly be absurd.
To refocus the discussion, which started with the preverb *per- (Gmc.
*fer-):
* The expected unstressed Verner variant would have been *ber-, since *bh
(= Verner *p) _always_ gives b- in initial position, whether in East,
North, or West Germanic.
* The suggestion that German/Dutch ver- might reflect a Verner variant of
PIE *per- is mistaken, not only because of the preceding point (Verner PIE
*p > PGmc *b), but also because *f- > *v- is the _normal_ development in
Dutch and German, e.g. in Vater/vader < *p&2té:r, where Verner's law
necessarily _never_ applied to the first consonant (it's Grimm's law that
applies).
In other words, Piotr's efforts to teach you the effects of Grimm's and
Verner's laws have so far been ineffective. But there's always hope, I
suppose...
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...