Updates regarding UPenn tree

[Sean Crist]

On Wed, 22 Sep 1999, Richard M. Alderson III wrote:

> On 20 Sep 1999, Sean Crist wrote:

>> Later, the team added _two_ new characters which forced the Italo-Celtic
>> sub-branch (not just one character as I previously incorrectly reported).
>> One was the *p..kw > *kw..kw character (a sound change shared by Italic
>> and Celtic)

> And potentially by Germanic, as well:  Cf. the word for "5".

Actually, it was the other way around in Germanic; *p..kw > *p..p, not
> *kw..kw.  If it were the same rule as Italo-Celtic, then *penkwe would
come out in in PGmc as *hwinhw-, which would give something fairly bizarre
like /hwajhw/ or /wajw/ "five" in Modern English.

That's a pretty phonotactically degenerate form, so I doubt very much that
it would have surfaced this way in Modern English without being worked
over by some repair strategy.  Also, I'm not sure if /hw/ would count as a
following voiceless fricative for the Ingvaeonic nasal deletion +
compensatory lengthening; if not, then the nasal would still be there as
it is in Modern German, and the vowel would be that of "hit".

Actually, it occurs to me that this change might just as easily have been
post-Grimm's Law as pre-.  *penkwe would give *finhw- by Grimm's Law and
by the raising of /e/ before nasals.  It could readily be the case that
learners would mishear /hw/ as /f/ in this environment, reanalysing it as
*/finf/, which is the correct PGmc reconstruction. I can't think of any
problem with this right off.

Okay, I rambled a little.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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