Latin <pice->
English <pitch>
Basque <bike>
<be:k> ->
Danish <beg>
Swedish <beck>
Basque is supposedly a loan from Latin (/p/ > /b/ is standard), and
the (West) Germanic words from Latin. Kuhn might assume they came
from a Nordwestblock word, therefore un-Grimm-shifted; but how to
explain the /b-/ in the North Germanic words?
Vennemann, always on the lookout for Basque substrate loans into IE
languages mentions the vigesimal system of Basque and then lists the
various IE twenties' systems, among them Danish ('recent, therefore
spurious') and Old/Middle Irish ('recent, therefore evidence that
it's ancient in the population').
There is a tendency among certain German linguists (Kuhn is not one
of them) to ignore Danish evidence; they quote Swedish & Norwegian at
length and their dialects, but no Danish nor dialects; I sometimes
wonder if this is a remnant of an old political dispute. Anyway, I'd
like to see equal standards applied here. The vigesimal system in
Danish comes from Jutland, which, judging from placename evidence,
only partially was subject to the same invasions as those that
brought the Germanic language to Denmark.
Wrt. the latter, Kuhn takes (among other things) the many dialect
roots and placenames with initial /p-/ as evidence that the
Nordwestblock did not participate in the Grimm shift. I posted a long
list of Jysk words with initial /p-/ some time back. The existence of
those words should prove that the Grimm shift didn't take place in
Jutland, as it didn't in the Nordwestblock, but that as there it was
brought there by an invasion.
Still, that doesn't explain the /b-/ of the North Germanic 'pitch'
words. Is it an old Vasconic loan; was Jutland once Vasconic-speaking
(in Vennemann's sense)?
Torsten