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

Whenever a numeral displays a wrong initial consonantism, I always think about external sandhi. Could this work here?

I suspect the clusters in fimf thu^sunt '5000' and sehs thu^sunt '6000' could yield the desired result, with -f th- > -f t- and -s th- > -s t-. It would be a lot better if -n th- also showed a development to -n t- (that would give us a lot more cases from where t- could have been generalized), but that's not really in the cards, is it? And 5000 and 6000 aren't that commonly occurring. So maybe it's a non-starter.

Anders

---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <grzegorj2000@...> wrote:

Germanic *th yielded d in German. So, we would expect *dausent "1000" (cf. Eng. thousand, Old Saxon thu^sundig etc. (+ attestation of t- in Balto-Slavic). Dutch duizend is regular, as well as OHG du^sunt is.

If the MHD and modern German forms with t- are borrowings, from what dialect/language?

And if their development was regular, are there more German words with t- on the place of Germanic th-?

Kluge only states "Lautlich zu erwarten wäre nhd. d-" - this is just statement, no way explanation. If d- was expected like Kluge says, why t-?