> English
'elbow' and its Germanic cognates are compounds of 'ell'
and 'bow'.
> Old English elnboga (which occurs as well as 'elgoba', the only
form you
> quote from Watkins), Old High German elinbogo and Old Norse o,lnbogi
> illustrate the compounding summed up in Proto-Germanic *alinobogon.
>
> The word for 'bow', the weapon, is 'boga' in Old English; the
change of
> unsoftened, intervocalic g > w is a regular change from Old English
to
> Middle English. It's a weak noun in Old English, i.e. the oblique
cases
> have -n-, and in German its uninflected 'Bogen'. (The OHG
nominative
> singular was 'bogo'.) West Germanic languages were very fond of
forming
> weak nouns (and of course, we have the weak form of the adjective
with the
> same suffix), whence what you refer to as "parasitic 'n'".
Actually, I now find some of this "parasitic n" in Akkadian. Maybe it was
there all along
and disappeared from others.
> The issue of non-Germanic cognates of 'bow' and 'bow' (both the
homonyms) is
> complicated. The Germanic forms point to PIE *bHeugH-, but the
other
> languages (Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, at least - I haven't checked
Pokorny
> for other languages) point to PIE *bHeug.
>
> As I see it, you are offering
>one for PIE *bHeugH or Germanic *beug,
> Turkic bük. There used to be a lot of doubt about the phonetic
realisation
> of this Altaic *p-, so the relationship may be plausible.
>
> I apologise for not beang able to trim this post much.
>
Danish has 'bukke', Swedish 'buga' for "bow" (vb.). That kind of
behaviour will make the root a member of Schrijver's
hypothetical "language of geminates"
Like every sound change suggestion, we always have to start off with some
basic core
and then fill it in later. I think this is along the right track.
Torsten
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--
Mark Hubey
hubeyh@...
http://www.csam.montclair.edu/~hubey