[tied] Re: Bow and arrow

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:

> On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 20:37:25 +0000, andrew_and_inge
> <100761.200@...> wrote:
>
> >So how did a "p" in classical times being spoken by Celtic people,
> >end up as a "ch"? I had been thinking it was via an early change
> >to "k", and then on to "ch" as per High German. You seem to be
> >saying that it was via "f"?
>
> Latin captus gives Gaulish caxtos (assuming with Delamarre
> that the word is not native, but taken from Latin, although
> nothing changes if caxtos < PIE *kaptos). The change pt >
> cht seems to be pan-Celtic, and no intermediate stage is
> attested, as far as I know. It may have been pt > ft > xt,
> or pt > kt > xt. I slightly prefer the first alternative.
>
> >Of course the first Germanic shift of
> >p>f had finished long before the classical writing we refer to, so
> >you mean the high german shift? But would we expect High German
> >Luft>Lucht? Or was that a Frankish change shared by Dutch and
> >Luxemburgish? Does Luxemburgish have Luft or Lucht?
>
> The Dutch (Lower Franconian) change ft > xt has nothing to
> do with the general Germanic or High German consonant
> shifts. It's an independent development, which happened
> sometime in Middle Dutch.
>

Odd that the Dutch should repeat the change of the Gauls. Btw, given
the /a/ of 'captus', the Latin word itself might be loaned. It also
has a cognate in Germanic with /a/: *haft- which would earn it a
place in Kuhn's list of Latin - Germanic cognates with /a/.

Torsten