On 2006-03-08 16:50, andrew jarrette wrote:
> I am curious about the origin of West Germanic geminated voiced stops
> that do not arise from a following *j, as in Old English /crabba/,
> /stagga/, /frogga/, /codd/, /stubb/, Old Norse /klubb/, Old Saxon
> /roggo/, etc. Are these purely expressive geminations, or are they
> regular phonological developments of *b, *d, *g (< *bh, *dh, *gh/g'h or
> *p, *t, *k/k'?) plus *n, or something else? I thought primitive
> Germanic only had unvoiced geminated stops, and I thought that any IE
> stop plus *n yielded Germanic geminated voiceless (only) stops. Also
> why does /dd/ seem to be rarer than /bb/ or /gg/?
Note that the geminated stops are particularly frequent in weak nouns,
whose nasal suffix has a long history (well beyound Germanic) as an
element forming hypocoristic words, pejorative nicknames etc. Gemination
is also cross-linguistically frequent in expressive vocabulary
(including hypocoristics). Kluge's Law (whereby *-Kn-, *-Gn- and *-GHn-
all go to PGmc. *-KK- in Vernerian contexts) certainly reinforced this
tendency to use geminates in weak stems by producing allomorphic
alternation of, say, *-þ-an- (with original root accent) and *-tt- (fron
*-þ-n- plus an originally accented inflectional ending. There would have
been a similar effect involving other consonants e.g. *-l-n- > *-ll-, or
*-s-n- > *-z-n- > *-nn-. By historical times, gemination was just a
conventional device in forming pet names, cf. Torht-helm > Totta,
Sæ:-beorht > Sabba, Wulf-sta:n > Wuffa, etc. Wait for my article on the
etymology of <docga>* (too appear in the Indogermanische Forschungen
this year) where discuss the origin of -gg- also in <frogga> etc.
Piotr