> > Whether it is *kwou or *gwou is more than just a matter of
> > intellectual curiosity, right? I have already quoted BArber (2001)
> > to the effect that who changed what and how has an impact on
> > deciding the homeland and hence the history of real people.
> >
> > http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1674658
>
> *kWou- and *gWou- point to different homelands? Just how do they do so?
Well, Verner's Law was later needed to account for exceptions to the
Grimm's Law.
<
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=584056>
"This (Verner's Law) discovery gave a depth of history to
Proto-Germanic. In Proto-Indo-European, as also in early Greek and
Sanskrit, and still in a few modern languages like Latvian and
Slovenian, accent was a variable pitch that could be on any syllable.
It was clear that this was true of early Proto-Germanic, and allowed
Verner's Law to apply."
Not sure what is meant by "This (Verner's Law) discovery gave a depth
of history to Proto-Germanic." Does it mean it makes the Germanic
family look older than it is?
"Grammatically, Proto-Germanic reduced the Indo-European tenses to
just two, present and past. It then innovated an entirely new series
of so-called "weak" past tenses, with a d ending, of unknown origin.
This is where we get our walk - walked. Elaborations like making
compound tenses with "will", "have" etc. arose later.
A huge amount of Germanic vocabulary is of unknown origin. As much as
one third of it hasn't got any cognate in other Indo-European
branches, including very common words like sea, earth, blood, hand,
evil, little, sick, bring, run."
The place of Germanic in the IE family seems a little bit insecure.
Germanic ia also instrumental in ruining Warnov-Ringe's (CPHL project)
perfect tree models.
"There's an interesting discussion of the original homeland and date
of split (neither of which are known with any certainty) at:
http://www.ling.su.se/staff/oesten/papers/Theorigin.pdf"
Perhaps the Grimm-Verner proposals allow proto Germanic to split off
very early from the mother river and thus affecting the time line and
homeland equations. Unfortunately that "interesting discussion" link
goes no where.
The same website also labels J. Grimm as a "nationalist." But enough
nonsense already.
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=497644
"Grimm's Law is considered a product of the wildly veering mind of
Jacob Grimm (philologist, anthologist, and nationalist)"
Thanks for taking the time to answer what must be to you silly questions.
M. Kelkar