From: dgkilday57
Message: 71652
Date: 2013-12-11
---In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, <dgkilday57@...> wrote:[...]
Grk. _tetagó:n_ requires a different PIE root *teh2g- 'to seize', and ON _taka_ in my opinion is best explained through the /w/-extension (attested in several IE branches) of *deh3-, originally 'to take' (as in Hittite), not 'to give' as generally elsewhere in IE, where the semantic shift 'take' > 'take (for someone else)' > 'give (to someone else)' occurred. Development of Gmc. *-k(W)- from PIE *-h3w- was probably pretonic only, that is pre-Grimm's Law *-h3w-´ > *-gW-´, but *´-h3w- > *´-w-. Thus 'living' involved PIE masc. sg. nom. *gWih3wós, voc. *gWíh3we > pre-GL nom. *gWigWós, voc. *gWíwe > post-GL nom. *kWikWós, voc. *kWíwe. East Gmc. created a new paradigm from the vocative stem *kWiwo- > *kWiwa- > Go. masc. sg. nom. _qius_, acc. _qiwana_, etc. West and North Gmc. used the other stem *kWikWo- > *kWikWa-.
*****
This accentual explanation works better in reverse. What has become known as Dybo's Law in Germanic, Celtic, and Italic (involving a situation parallel to the one addressed by the original Slavic DL) deletes a nonsyllabic laryngeal immediately preceding a nonsyllabic resonant in a pretonic syllable. Thus PIE *wiXró- 'man' yields Skt. _vi:rá-_, Av. _vi:ra-_, Lith. _výras_, Latv. _wîrs_, but Lat. _vir_, OIr _fer_, OE _wer_, etc. Now, since /w/ is a nonsyllabic resonant, we expect PIE *gWih3wó- 'living' to be reduced to *gWiwó- in Old Western IE, yielding Celtic *bivo- (OIr _biu_, etc.) and Gmc. *kWiwa-, which is what we find in Gothic _qius_. Latin _vi:vus_, however, does not show /h3/-deletion and must have been generalized from the vocative, masc. sg. *gWíh3we, etc. The same goes for NWGmc *kWikWa-, in which *h3 either merged with following *w before Grimm's Law to yield *gW, or after it to yield *kW, in a purely Proto-Germanic affair. 'The living' were likely addressed in funerary and other ritual speeches, providing a high enough frequency for the vocative to split the paradigm of 'living'.
Ringe (From PIE to PGmc 68-70) calls this fortition of *h3 before *w "Cowgill's Law", and suggests that Gothic _qiwa-_ underwent ad-hoc dissimilatory loss of the second *k. Since there is already a Cowgill's Law involving Greek /u/, I think this Germanic law should be named after Austin instead. When Dybo's Law is taken into account, no ad-hoc dissimilation is required in Gothic, since DL bleeds the input to Austin's Law with oxytones. This whole business raises three more issues, each worthy of its own post:
1. Ringe suggests that *h2 was fortited in the same environment as *h3, but gives only one dubious example of a pronoun. Better examples are given by Lehmann (PIE Phonology ch. 5). It further appears from Lehmann's compilation that *h4 was fortited by following *w to PGmc *g. I am tempted to generalize that the strong laryngeals *h2 and *h3 had merged into one phoneme, *X2, in Early PGmc, while the weak laryngeals *h1 and *h4 had merged into *X1. But testing such speculation will require a revision of Lehmann's presentation to take Dybo's Law into account and eliminate the obsolete "reduced grade".
2. Kroonen treats Dybo's Law like Osthoff's, operating independently late in the history of PGmc soundlaws.
www.fachtagung.dk/presentations/175.pdf
On the matter of Holtzmann's Verschärfung, Kroonen rejects Lehmann's laryngeal-based approach and advocates a return to Kluge's accentual explanation, which Lehmann had already found defective. 'Egg' is central to the Verschärfung problem and its connection with Dybo's and Austin's Laws. Someone will end up with it on his face.
3. If Dybo's Law also operated before aspirated mediae (whatever they actually were) or their reflexes in Early PGmc before loss of the PIE accent, and these consonants were geminated by merger with a preceding laryngeal, it becomes possible to explain the bothersome alternation between simple and geminated mediae in certain Gmc. lexical items. For example, the multiple stems of 'crab' and 'knave' can be put on a secure Indo-European etymological footing, eliminating the supposed need for Kuiper's European substrate A2. "Substrata non sunt multiplicanda sine ratione!"
Douglas G. Kilday