German ge- ptcpl cognates?

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu> wrote:

>To answer a few of the other points you bring up:

>-You suggest that Gmc /g/ could be the reflex of a laryngeal in ge-.  In
>cases where we're lucky enough to have evidence from the other branches
>for a word-initial laryngeal, Germanic uniformly has zero (minus a very
>technical point regarding the development of the Gmc strong verb classes
>which isn't relevant here).  If a laryngeal developed into Gmc */g/ in
>this case, it would be the only such case we have, and it would be
>inconsistent with all of the other Gmc words descending from a PIE word
>with an initial laryngeal.

There are a few cases where a non-word-initial laryngeal seems to
appear in Germanic as a velar stop (e.g. quick < *gwiH3wos), but
the result is always /k/, not /g/.

>-Also, if there were a laryngeal, it would make its presence felt in Greek
>and Indo-Iranian.  It's too late in the evening for me to go digging thru
>my notes, but a laryngeal would affect the vowel quality in Greek, and if
>I remember right, a larygeal usually comes out at *a in Indo-Iranian.
>I'm not sure what happens to a word-initial larygeal before a vowel in IIr
>(I do seem to remember that word-initial augment + HC- > a:C, i.e. where
>the laryngeal belongs to the stem; but I'm not sure if HaC- would give aC-
>or a:C-).

aC-  The augment might well have contained a laryngeal, indeed it
must have for those who think that no PIE word started with a
vowel.  The usual reconstruction is *H1e- (> Greek e-).

>I'm a little surprised that Don accepts the suggestion that co(m)- might
>be cognate with *ga-; the claim looks weak to me. It's true that *ga- is
>often used in forming calques from Latin words with co(m)-; but this
>doesn't strike me as a particularly good argument that the two are
>cognate.  You can certainly use a word or affix in forming a calque
>without the word or affix being cognate with anything in the language that
>you're calquing on.

The "default" development of PIE *k in Germanic is *g, unless in
absolute initial (i.e. directly preceding the PGmc. accent), or
when directly following the *PIE* accent.  Although the preverb
ga- is initial, it is always unstressed.  Unstressed *ko- > ga-
might be perfectly regular.

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