Re: Why there is t- in German tausend "thousand"?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Bhrihskwobhloukstroy <bhrihstlobhrouzghdhroy@...> wrote:

>
> May I state again that it was an etymology only for the aberrant
> German forms? It would be complete nonsense to replace a phonological
> impasse (OHG tu^sunt < PIE *t-) with a much greater one (OHG #d- < PIE
> *dh-)! I'm just suggesting tu^sunt and thu^sunt represent different
> etyma. Claims that X and Y (in this case, tu^sunt and thu^sunt)
> "cannot be separated" are justified in a regular system of diatopic
> phonological variation, otherwise they're quite arbitrary,

I'm not sure what you mean by "regular system of diatopic variation", but if you have a set of words with a sufficient amount of shared phonetic material, plus matching semantics, this overrides the criterion of regular phonetic correspondence when drawing a connection between two or more forms.

E.g., I would say that there is no need to find regular sound rules to justify a relationship between Finnish kuningas "king" and OHG kuning. The two share a sequence of six phonemes, and they match semantically (compare thu^sunt/tu^sunt, with at least a five-phoneme match) probabilistically, this is enough to conclude they share a common ancestor.

None of this implies rejecting the regularity of sound change -- it may turn out that the pair of kuningas/kuning perfectly follows a pattern of Finnish/Germanic sound correspondence from a certain time period. But, it does mean that there are other criteria that can be used independently of regular sound correspondence to conclude that a set of words can or can't be separated from one another.