Re: Grimm shift as starting point of "Germanic"

On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:53:14 -0000, "tgpedersen"
<tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>Germanic doesn't have infixed verbs otherwise AFAIK, apart from
>'standan', so that part seems OK: geminates could be the missing
>n-infixed verbs. But that's not what you or Kluge are saying, you want
>to derive the from the n-suffix. How come then, that the n-suffix
>survives as n-suffix, without gemination in the Gothic 4th weak class?
>Wasn't it supposed to geminate and then go away? Doesn't that require
>an explanation?

Of course. Kluge's law only applies to combinations of
(Post-Verner) voiced stop + /n/. The suffix *-nah2- would
have survived in enough cases (after vowels, resonants,
voiceless stops and consonant clusters) to continue as a
productive inchoative morpheme.

[...]

>> If the "language of geminates" was a substrate of Germanic,
>> we wouldn't expect "these stems" to appear in other
>> languages (and certainly not in ungeminated shape).
>
>Of course we would. That language of geminates substrate is defined by
>geography, it is a language of NWEurope, it's not a substrate of just
>one language. And languages other than Germanic don't allow gemination, so
>they would never be rendered with gemination in those languages.

Celtic and Italic allow consonant gemination, and so does
Finnic. Only Balto-Slavic is not so fond of it.


=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
miguelc@...