History and Sound Laws

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>I don't have my stuff with me, but if this [shirt/skirt] is prehistorical,
>how do you get the chronology.

-- because we have written records from the period of this loan (9th-11th
centuries CE, during the Viking-era Scandinavian settlements in England) and
it's "shirt" in Anglo-Saxon and "skirt" in Old Norse.

>How could the sound laws make 'skirt' necessary, if they also produced
>'shirt?'

-- different patterns of sound-shift were operating in North and West
Germanic respectively.