Re: [tied] Re: Germanic declensions?

Richard Wordingham wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Michael Smith"
> <mytoyneighborhood@...> wrote:
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>What is the (reconstructed I assume) Germanic nominative plural
>>equivalent of the latin -i, such as occurs in tribal names such as
>>Alemanni, Marcomanni, Marsi, etc.? In other words, what would tribal
>>names such as these have been in Germanic?
>
>
> -o:z before the reduction of unstressed vowels kicked in. The Romans
> correctly identified the Germanic a-stems (masculine) with the Latin
> 2nd declension.

I believe (at the moment) that all the relevant Germanic variants of the
ending can (and probably should) be derived from *-o:z-iz < pre-Gmc.
*-o:s-es. For the WGmc. ancestor of Old English I assume an early
apocope of the final syllable with short *-i- in polysyllabic words,
with the devoicing of the exposed fricative before it could be hit by
rhotacism; that explains -as, definitely incompatible with PGmc. *-o:z.
Goth. -o:s and ON -ar are straight from *-o:z(z), with vowel loss and
geminate simplification. The syncope-plus-devoicing proposed above
accounts for a number of verb endings as well, e.g. *bHére-ti > *BeriDi

> OE birT, and *-o-nti > *-anDi > OE -aT : Goth -and, without invoking

complex analogy to reverse the effects Verner's Law.

Piotr