08-08-03 13:01, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
>>> 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.
...
> 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...
Well, to be fair to Torsten, I did tell him that Verner's Law applied to
_fricatives_, whether inherited from pre-Germanic (*s) or produced by
Grimm's Law (*f, *þ, *x, *xW), and I hope there's nothing controversial
about such a statement.
One has to remember that we use the symbols *b, *d, *g and *gW for
Proto-Germanic consonants with the proviso that they cover the
continuant allophones as well: in fact, many people prefer the notation
*B, *ð, *G and *GW for the Germanic reflexes of *bH, *dH, *g(^)H and
*gWH (and for the Vernerian reflexes of the corresponding voiceless
stops), and since the distinction in Proto-Germanic was subphonemic,
it's really a matter of taste and of typographical convenience.
The exact distribution of the phonetic values (whether in PGmc. or in
the daughter languages at their various stages) is uncertain and still
debated. For example, Girvan, Campbell and Hogg argue that early OE
initial <g-> represented a velar fricative rather than a stop. I can't
say I'm sure how Gothic <b>, <d> and <g> were actually pronounced, even
word-initially, and I prefer to leave some room for uncertainty. The
fact that the Gothic letters in question were modelled on Greek "beta",
"delta" and "gamma" hardly helps to disambiguate their manner of
articulation.
Leaving this marginal problem apart, the question remains why we don't
get *ber-/*bra-/*bur- (no matter if the initial was phonetically *[b-]
or *[B-]) rather than *fer-/*fra-/*fur- in unstressed prefixes.
Piotr