Re: Etymology of the Italian surname 'Brighenti'

At 12:22:22 AM on Tuesday, September 23, 2008, tgpedersen wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 4:06:15 PM on Sunday, September 21, 2008, tgpedersen
>> wrote:

>>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
>>> <BMScott@> wrote:

>>>> At 4:57:06 PM on Saturday, September 20, 2008,
>>>> tgpedersen wrote:

>> >> [...]

>>>>> This is how I imagined the -en- > -in- rule of
>>>>> Germanic happened.
>>>>> Once it inflected:

>>>>> *sprenga *sprengm.
>>>>> *sprengis *sprengiþ
>>>>> *sprengiþ *sprengn.þ

>>>>> with umlaut
>>>>> *sprenga *sprengm.
>>>>> *springis *springiþ
>>>>> *springiþ *sprengn.þ

>>>>> generalized
>>>>> *springa *springm.
>>>>> *springis *springiþ
>>>>> *springiþ *springn.þ

>>>>> vel sim., Brian!

>>>> Pre-nasal raising (*e > *i / _NC) is distinct from
>>>> i-umlaut of *e and occurs in all classes of words.
>>>> (E.g., *kinnuz 'cheek' by way of *genwu- from *g^é:nu-s ~
>>>> *g^énw- 'jaw'.) It must also be a relatively late change
>>>> in pre-PGmc., in view of Finn. <rengas> 'ring' from a
>>>> pre-stage of PGmc. *hringaz.

[...]

>>> But I think the *-en- > *-in- spread as hypercorrection
>>> from those strong verbs being regularized, see
>>> http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/Shibbolethisation.html

>> Why? At best your fixation on shibboleths makes you a
>> blind man claiming that an elephant is very like a rope.

> The traditional explanation claims two separate rules
> caused *-en- > -in- in 2,3sg, 'pre-nasal raising' and
> umlaut; my explanation has no such causal overlap.

The verbs *bindanã 'to tie', *helpanã 'to help' and *werpanã
'to throw' are all Class III strong verbs and started out
with identical root vowel (*e) and identical conjugations,
but only in the first was the *e of the root raised to *i
throughout the present. You want analogy to extend i-umlaut
of *e from words like *bindanã to completely unrelated words
like *hringaz, but not to words like *helpanã; that's very
implausible. It's much simpler to note that nasals have a
tendency to raise preceding /e/ anyway, so that the observed
change isn't particularly surprising; there's no need to
invoke dubious psychological explanations. (And for all I
know there may be other reasons to keep the two separate.)

> Two rules causing the same one effect is a sign the theory
> was designed wrong.

Unless there really are two different things causing the
same effect.

Do you really imagine that the possibility of a single cause
never occurred to someone who actually knew what he was
doing? I never cease to be astonished at the readiness of
some dilettantes to assume that a couple of centuries' worth
of experts missed the obvious instead of rejecting it for
good reason.

Brian