Re: Dating *e > *i in Germanic

From: caotope
Message: 71715
Date: 2014-04-18

> On point 2, Tacitus has Segestes, Veleda, and Venethi (= OHG Winida) but Segime:rus
> and Segimundus (= Ammian's Sigismundus with a different stem-formation). Evidently
> the unstressed *e was first raised before nasals. This material is in Streitberg 1896
> (p. 55), one of Ringe's sources (indeed one of the best comprehensive sources on
> Germanic, despite its age).

Do you mean to suggest that this would have been the same change as *eN > *iN in stressed syllables, which would then have been the earliest change of its sort?

> On point 3, I arrived at a similar conclusion supporting "late" /i/-umlaut of *e (and
> *en,C > *in,C), and was forced to regard Fi. _teljo_ and _rengas_ as borrowed from Early
> NGmc, not Late PGmc, on the basis of studying 'wolf'.

The shift *o > *a in Germanic is not a lower bound for the loaning of _rengas_ and _kuningas_, though. Proto-Uralic did not allow 2nd syllable *o - this arose in Finnic by *aw > *o (difficult to date, could have included an intermediate stage *ou) and *aj > *oi (from which *oi > *o only during the early 2nd millennium in individual dialects), and seems to have even after these remained a disfavored stem vowel, until the influx of loans from Germanic with PG *-o:. Finnic would for a long period have adopted any word ending in *-os or *-oz with the ending *-as. There are indeed no **-os-stems in the Finnic languages (as distinguished from *-o-kse-stems such as _tule-_ "to come" : _tulos, tulokse-_ "result"; these only occur in derivatives anyway, never in loans.) Cf. _porsas_ "pig" (not **porsos), whose 1st-syllable *o is generally considered an archaism. Although I suppose loaning not directly from IE but from a precedessor of Mordvinic *purc´@..., which can go back to not only *porc´Vs but also *parc´@..., cannot be ruled out...

> Indo-European labiovelars lose their labial component in Common Germanic before *-a-
> only when this *-a- matches *-o- in IE branches which maintain the original phonemic
> distinction. If the Gmc. *-a- reflects a sonant laryngeal, the labial component is
> retained. Thus Gmc. *xalsa- 'neck' (Gothic _hals_, etc.) < Proto-Indo-European
> *kWólh1so- (Latin _collum_), but Gmc. *kWaB-janaN 'to plunge, dip, dive' (Old Norse
> _kvefja_) < PIE *gW&2/4bH- (Greek _baphênai_ 'to be dipped, dyed'). Similarly the
> labial component is lost before Gmc. *-o:- only when it represents an /o/-colored long
> vowel from PIE *-eh3-, *-oh{x}-, or original *-o:-, not an /a/-colored one from PIE *-eh2-
> or *-eh4-. Thus Gmc. *ko:N acc. 'cow' (Old Saxon _ko:_, Old High German _kuo_,
> _chuo_) < PIE *gWó:m (Grk. _bôn_, Umbrian _bum_, etc.), but Gmc. *xWo:stan- 'cough'
> (Old English _hwo:sta_, OHG _h(w)uosto_) < PIE *kWeh2/4s- (Albanian _kollë_ 'cough' <
> *kWa:s-la:, cf. Sanskrit _ká:sate:_ 'coughs').

This is an interesting proposal. I've also been looking for evidence that PIE *o was phonetically labial, which seems to be difficult to establish. However, this evidence does not seem unambiguous: how do you establish *kW- and not *k- in "neck"? If only Old English consistently maintains PG *KWo: and *Ko: separate, but has the different formation _cu:_ for "cow", can you really rule out PG *kWo:N? And of course, what of the demonstrative stem *xWa-?

_j.