Re: [tied] Sanskrit to German ?

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 36755
Date: 2005-03-15

On 05-03-15 12:56, A. wrote:

> A quick question, I was reading some of Rydberg's work and suddenly
> wondered:
> Does the Sanslrit "P" change into "F" in Germanic tongues?

Well, no, because the Germanic languages do not derive from Sanskrit.
Both Germanic and Sanskrit come from a common ancestor known as
Proto-Indo-European and are related via this common ancestor. What
happened was this:

PIE *p became Sanskrit /p/ (no change).

PIE *p became *f in the ancestor of Germanic as a result of a
sound-change known as Grimm's Law. In some cases this *f became voiced
and merged with Germanic /b/ (another change, known as Verner's Law).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner's_law

Consequently, the Skt. phoneme /p/ normally CORRESPONDS to Germanic /f/
(or /b/, if Verner's Law applies).

The cluster *sp, however, has survived intact in both groups, so here,
exceptionally, the correspondence is straightforward, as in Gmc. *spex-
: Skt. spas'- < PIE *spek^- 'watch'.

Piotr