Latin mecum, tecum, etc.

[Thomas McFadden]

On Sat, 21 Jul 2001, petegray wrote:

> Good thinking!   I checked the etymology of  da- and wo- in German, and
> you're absolutely right.  Da was originally dar.  Wo is less clear, but it
> appears to have been war (with a not o) - certainly that's how it appears in
> Gothic.   So the -r- is a survival.

> Peter

you actually don't have to go very far back to find signs of this.  in
somewhat older writing you'll find plenty of spellings like darnach,
although i don't recall ever seeing someting like wornach.  of course this
may well be an etymologizing spelling.  in any case it's easy to
understand why the -r would have been retained intervocalically but lost
finally, although i don't think the loss of final -r can be connected with
the modern German vocalization of coda r, since i seem to recall seeing
r-less spellings of these words in MHG, when coda r was still presumably
pronounced as r.  incidentally, da is commonly (usually?) spelled do in
MHG, i.e. it looks like it rhymed with wo, as expected based on the other
Gmc. languages.  someone on the list who knows more about the history of
German might be able to say something about how the two ended up NOT
rhyming in NHG.  i have a suspicion that it might reflect some sort of
dialect difference (wo from he south, da from the center?).  does anybody
happen to know whether they rhyme in modern dialects, e.g. Bavarian and
Alemannic?

Tom