--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Wordingham" wrote:
>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Rick McCallister wrote:
>
> > Germanic fimf would either be a result of **pempe or a borrowing from either P-Celtic or P-Italic or P-whatever, wouldn't it? Because we ain't got no P-Germanic or at least one I ever heard of.
>
> What we do have is a number of cases where pre-Grimm *p corresponds to *kW in other languages. Miguel championed PIE *pW, which resolved itself to *kW or *p in the daughter languages. The outcome *pW > *p is commonest in the development of Germanic, as seen in English words such as _four_, _five_, _liver_, _oven_, and _wolf_.
I never understood Miguel's view that labiolabials are inherently unstable, when one of his own native languages contains such words as _puedo_, _bueno_, _muelo_, etc. More importantly, I was never able to fathom the criteria for developing *p out of *pW in his theory.
Having wrestled with this problem for a decade, I think we are dealing with a soundlaw which produced Paleo-Gmc. labials from labiovelars under certain conditions, but analogical processes have almost completely effaced the original transparency of the law. In my view Eichner has only part of the conditions. Provisionally, my guess is that a labiovelar had to be occluded by a following consonant (including a NON-SYLLABIC resonant) in order to be assimilated to a labial elsewhere in the word (not necessarily in an adjacent syllable).
With 'four', I believe labialization occurred in the ORIGINAL ordinal, which involved zero-grade *kWtWr- (cf. Oscan _trutum_ 'the fourth time' and the GN _Ptrunius_ in the Ager Paelignus). The *f- was extended to the cardinal (cf. Lat. _qui:nque_ with vocalism from the ordinal _qui:ntus_, which has -i:- from loss of *-k-). Likewise with 'five', from *p(e)NkWto-. Swabian has a form without labialization (if memory serves, _fenk_ 'fifteen'), showing that the Gmc. protoform was not *fimfi as sometimes cited.
'Wolf' is difficult outside Gmc. as well. I suspect the labial was generalized from an old nom. sg. root-noun *wl.kWs, not the thematic *wl.kWos. The popularity of names like _Be:owulf_ in Gmc. probably kept the old nom. sg. alive and allowed a new them. paradigm with -f- to be generated.
'Liver' cannot be equated with anything outside Armenian without assuming tabuistic anlaut-substitution, so it is unreliable. 'Leave' and 'sieve' (also cited by Miguel) may have had original labials, and been wrongly etymologized as cognate with words having labiovelars outside Gmc. 'Oven' has labiovelar forms (Go. _auhns_, Sw. dial. _ugn_), and very likely we are dealing with paradigm-splitting due to the soundlaw acting on some but not all cases of the noun.
In my view OE _feolufer_, _filfor_ etc. 'type of marine bird' has nothing to do with ML _porphyrio_, but is based on the disyllabic root for 'ceremonial axe' *pelekW- and formed on the same basis as 'pelican', based on the shape of the bird's bill. This is an example of the labial being more than one syllable away.
DGK