Re: [tied] Germanic geminates

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...>
wrote:

>
> 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-.

Kuhn ascribes those Germanic words with geminates (especially those
where geminate alternates with single consonant) to the
Nordwestblock substrate. He also questions Kluge's law. Note that
many of them have no good cognates outside of Germanic.


Torsten