*gwh in Gmc.

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

On Mon, 04 Dec 2000 21:45:31 +0100, Xavier Delamarre
<xavier.delamarre at free.fr> wrote:

>It is Seebold's personnal invention that IE *gwh- becomes Germanic b-. His
>edition of Kluge's "Etym. Wvrterb. der deutschen Spr." (22. Auflage, 1989)
>uses the law aboundently, e.g. _bdhen_ < *ghwre:- (p 54), _bitten_ <
>*ghwedh-, OIr. guidid etc. (p. 88).

>It has been rejected by some linguists (Polomi) but accepted by others like
>Calvert Watkins (see his "IE Roots" : Eng. bane < OEng. bana < germ. *bano:n
>< IE *gwhen- 'strike', and his "How to kill a Dragon", 423).

>I find the law very convincing.

>The discovery in the last decades that IE *ghw- becomes b- in Germanic and
>w- in Gaulish is the best proof that IE comparative grammar is not a dead
>science and can still undergo improvements.

Thanks.

As I may have mentioned here earlier, I have been investigating the
possible ramifications of hypothesizing that not only *k/*g/*gh had
labialized (*kw/*gw/*ghw) and palatalized (*k^/*g^/*gh^) variants, but
that this was originally the case for *all* (pre-)PIE consonants.

One interesting possibility is **pw, which would have mostly merged
with *kw (for obvious reasons, a labialized labial would have been a
highly marked phoneme), but with *p in (pre-)Germanic.  This could be
the case in the words "liver", "four", "-leven, -lve", "oven", "wolf"
and some others ("leave", "sieve", etc.).  The existence of a parallel
development *ghw (I prefer to spell it this way) > Gmc. *b would be
most interesting.  To be fully parallel with **pw -> *f, there should
be quite a number of exceptions to the "law" (that it's controversial
is therefore a good thing in principle).  I'm not too pleased with
"bane", however, being from the same root as *gunT- "Kampf, Schlacht",
which means a putative **bhwen- (for PIE *ghwen) "to kill" is out of
the question.  Not that it matters for judging the etymology by its
own merits...

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl