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

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

>
> 2013/11/13, johnvertical@... <johnvertical@...>:
> >> ---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <gprosti@> wrote:
> >>
> >> 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.
> >
> > Which itself can be overriden if the similarities can be shown to have
> > divergent origins, of course. In this case that'd require a whole bunch of
> > corroborating evidence for the model of forming numerals as "largest numeral
> > not yet named", though. The best precedent I can think for anything along
> > these lines is from the set-theoretical construction of ordinal numbers, a
> > bit advanced for a supposed pre-HG origin :)
> > (...)
> >
> > _j.
>
> *Bhr.: I concede a motivation "everything possible" isn't particularly
> sharp, but what about current þūsundī-etyma like "blow-hundred" (not
> "great-", precisely "blow") or "widening feminine entity"?
>

Whatever the original semantics of "thousand" were, there is a semantic match and (if I'm not mistaken) a regular phonemic correspondence between the modern-day reflexes of this stem -- this is what supports the reconstruction of such a stem in the first place.

In the case of your etymology for "tausend", the plausibility of the proto-form beginning in *dh- rests (as far as I can see) on the semantic motivation that you concede above isn't particularly strong.