--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:
>
> At 4:47:34 AM on Thursday, June 12, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > As for couch grass, that must be related to a different
> > root eg. *gWih3w- "live" (cf. Da. 'kvikgræs' "couch
> > grass", or something else, is 'couch' related?)
>
> This <couch> is. Couch grass is also quitch grass, and
> <quitch> directly continues OE <cwice>; <couch> seems
> originally to have represented /kutS/, so the development
> must have been something like /wi/ > /uj/ > /u/. It's also
> quick grass, twitch (with the opposite development from that
> seen in German quer < OHG twerh), and in the U.S. quack
> grass.
I've seen that development recently in a bid to explain river Dvina ->
German Düna; supposedly LG has swester -> süster too (Du. zuster, Sw.
syster, Da. søster), I thought myself of Dutch zoet /zu:t/, LG soet
/sö:t/, German süss, Sw söt, Da. sød "sweet". But those distribution
1) don't match geographically with each other, 2) or with any other
known major.
Further, if there were any truth to this supposed Inguaeonic *k > ts,
Dutch would have many more /ts/'s, and so would English, at least some
dialectal forms should have escaped the putative palatalization and
confusion with the result of /t/ + /sk/. The only other Dutch verb
with -ts- stem auslaut I can think of is botsen "push" and that is
under suspicion of non-Germanicness because of 1) the similarity with
the unexplained French battre, 2) the similarity with German putschen
(with NWB seemingly causeless p-/b- alternation), and perhaps even
with push (the extra -sk- in that one I could believe in), and 3) it
has no decent 'straight Germanic' relatives.
Torsten