Re: Tudrus

At 6:17:21 PM on Friday, January 7, 2011, t0lgsoo1 wrote:

>> lty. *antke = lty. a:nk, antje, dimin. till lty. ant (se
>> and).'

>>From *antika- ? It's grammatically a feminine in -a.

Depends on how late it is: <-ke> was a productive LG suffix
from an early date.

> These would correspond to *Antchen, Antlein (Entchen,
> Entlein).

>>It umlauts in ON: o,nd/endr (still in Danish: and/ænder).

> Umlaut?!

The ON shows two umlauts, actually: the <ö> in <önd> is the
result of u-umlaut of <a> in an earlier *anuði-, and the <e>
in the plural is the result of i-umlaut.

> Then standard German Ente would also be an Umlaut: the
> appropriate spelling would be Änte (but the pronunciation
> would be the same).

Standard German <Ente> is a queer duck. In MHG the word was
an i-stem and did indeed have i-umlaut: nom./acc. sing.
<ant>, gen./dat. sing. & nom. plur. <ente>. The regular NHG
reflex would be <Ant>, plural <Änte>. It seems, however,
that the old nom. plural replaced the singular, and the noun
entered the new mixed declension, with nom. plur. <Enten>.

>>Assuming paradigm regularization we could get both
>>Ant'(?)/Anten and Ente/Enten.

> But in South-German Bavarian the <a> in Ant'n is [a], i.e.
> no Umlaut.

'A Antn ohne an gscheiden Oasch is ka Antn!' (Found on the
web.) But I gather that some dialects have <Antn> only in
the plural, with singular <Ant>. Either way, the
non-umlauted vowel has been kept, but the declension has
still been changed from the MHG.

Brian