NE Germanic

[Steve Gustafson]

Couple misrememberings, further-rememberings, and corrections to my post on
reduplication and sharpening in Gmc ---

1. Old Norse actually preserved a couple of reduplicated verbs. Conditions
for keeping them were apparently set when the stems contained s- or r-.
 So -sa'- (sow) had a past 3sg. -so/ri- (<*soRi, <*sesi), and -ru'a- (row)
had a past -ro/ri-.  This small group actually attracted members by analogy,
so that -gru'a- (grow) formed a past -gro/ri-.  By this time, the
'reduplication' no doubt is no more noticed; what is added is a new past
suffix in -o/r-.

There are other hints of reduplication in conjugation oddities.  -Auka-
(add) yields -jo'k- from *aiauk.

So, I don't think you can say that the presence vs. absence of reduplication
is something that distinguishes Gothic from NWGmc.  It's rather that we have
Gothic texts before this inherited distinction got hammered.

2. In Gothic, *ww yields -ggw-, not -ddw- as I said earlier.

--

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