*gwh in Gmc.

[Hans-Werner Hatting]

[ moderator edited ]

Tom McFadden and Miguel Carrasquer Vidal reminded me that the facts in
Germanic are not exactly as I remembered them, and that German is alone in
attesting /n/ in the word for „5“. I must admit I was convinced that the
Nasal which vanished in North Sea Germanic had to have been /n/ (like in
*uns > us), but now that I think about it, there seems to be no convincing
reason for it not being /m/.

MCV wrote:
>My original examples were: "liver", "four", "-leven, -lve", "oven",
>"wolf", "leave"(?), "sieve"(?).  There's a labial in "wolf".

There is also a labial in _four_ (PIE *kwetwor-). But I take Your point.
Labials in the neighbourhood alone are not sufficient as an explanation, as
they don't account for Your other examples.
So, what are our choices?

1. To accept these as cases of „untriggered sporadic sound change“, which
is of course not satisfying;

2. To try to extend the triggers for a sporadic sound change *kw > *p. One
obvious candidate would be /l/. This would still leave „oven“ and
„sieve“ unaccounted for. As I am without any library for the time being,
what are the etymologies proposed for these words?

3. We could assume substrate influences or a dialect mixture in Germanic or, in
other words, a mixing of features from neighbouring dialects, like in, e.g.,
the German dialect of Cologne, where we generally have the development /t/ >
/ts/, /s/ (e.g. _zick_ /tsik/ „time“, NHG „Zeit“, but /t/ is kept in
some function words like _et_ „it“, _dat_ „that“). But substrate and
dialect influences are, of course, something of a „magic wand“, if there is
no further evidence for their existence.

4. We reconstruct a new series of phonemes for PIE, as has been proposed.

My problem with approach no. 4 is that I don't know of any evidence for such
a series other than from Germanic. If we assume that Germanic branched off
earliest (a problematic assumption in itself), we would not expect such
evidence, but in the scenario Douglas Kilday describes, we would expect some
traces of the /pw/ series in Anatolian. And, I don't want to repeat myself,
but I think the sound change /pw/ > /kw/ is not trivial – I would expect
different outcomes in different branches of IE languages, not a simple split
into a language keeping the series distinct, and the other ones merging
them.

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting