Principles of reconstruction.

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Justïn <justinelf at ...> wrote:
>
> That was an awesome answer Lama, I actually have an obnoxious question 
> the likes of which you would expect from an amateur Gothic enthusiast 
> who's only had one 4000 level course in linguistics:
> 
> How can I learn to do that?  I want to be able to derive my own 
> reconstructions from Proto-Germanic and back engineer my own words.  If 
> I could do that, I would post list after list of neologisms for 
> scholarly criticisms until we had a veritable dictionary of Gothic 
> words and phrases.  Granted, this may be coming out of young-blood 
> fervour but I am certainly interested in the back-engineering.
> 
> Are there any pre-established guides and resources to these Gothic 
> patterns, and which Proto-Germanic source are you using and where can I 
> get one?
> 
> Are we all using the same source for Proto-Germanic or is this in and 
> of itself a highly debated issue of favouring this or that resource?


There are plenty of uncertainties in Proto-Germanic vocabulary! 
Generally speaking, the sound change rules are regular, but language
being a human thing, quirks creep in.  For example, a word which is
attested in more than one branch of Germanic may follow different
declensions in the different dialects, so you could reconstruct the
same Proto-Germanic root from each, but different endings.  There's a
lot of that sort of thing.  Even if we knew everything about the
history of the language, we probably still wouldn't be able to point
to a single community of Proto-Germanic speakers speaking a perfectly
uniform language; it's a scholarly idealisation.

To reconstruct a Proto-Germanic word from a Gothic one, or the other
way around, you need to know all the relevant sound changes that might
affect the sounds in the word between Gothic and PG.  There's a lot od
useful stuff about this in the early chapters of Wright's Gothic
Grammar [ http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/goth_wright_about.html ]. 
Gerhard Köbler's Gothic dictionary has etymologies, but often gives a
few options for possible PG reconstructions, so you might need to know
a bit in advance to come to any conclusion about which is more likel 
Gerhard Köbler has a Proto-Germanic dictionary too along with
dictionaries of the earliest attested stages of the main branches of
Germanic [ http://www.koeblergerhard.de/publikat.html ].  There's
another important etymological dictionary of Proto-Germanic at Sean
Christ's site: Falk, Fick, Torp: Wörterbuch der Indogermanischen
Sprachen: Dritter Teil: Wortschatz der Germanischen Spracheinheit [
http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/etc/aa_texts.html ].

Another handy link: Lorenz Diefenbach: Vergleichendes Wörterbuch der
gotischen Sprache [
http://books.google.com/books?id=ZqAFAAAAQAAJ&pg=PP13#PPR1,M1 ].

If you have a word in say Old Norse and you want to reconstruct a
Gothic cognate, you need to know all the relavant sound changes that
would have affected the sounds in the word in its evolution from PG to
ON, as well as the Gothic sound changes.  For this, a good starting
point in English is Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse.  In German,
there's Adolf Noreen's Altisländische und altnorwegische Grammatik [
http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oi_noreen_about.html ]; this has more
detail than Gordon.  Other grammars on Sean Christ's site have
informations about Old Saxon, etc.  For Old English sound changes,
Campbell's Old English Grammar is very good.

Very often, distinctions of sounds in PG have been lost in later
Germanic languages, so it's not always clear how to reconstruct a word
that's only recorded in one or two dialects.  For example, /e/ in Old
English sometimes comes from PG /e/, sometimes /i/, sometimes /a/. 
Which it was in PG depends on what vowel came in the following
syllable; but often this vowel will have been lost or reduced in Old
English, in which case you need to find cognates in other Germanic
languages to triangulate by.  Likewise /o:/ in Old Norse might be from
PG /o:/ (fór) or /ah/ (nótt) or /unh/ (þótti), etc.  So again, you can
only tell which if the same word is recorded in a dialect that did
keep the distinction that Old Norse lost.  Sometimes the
Proto-Germanic form, supposing the word really is from PG, is clear
from just one dialect; sometimes you need two or more to calibrate,
using each to make up for the deficiencies of the others.  Sometimes
you even need to look further afield at cognates in other
Indo-European languages.

It can also help to know a bit about the grammar of the various early
Germanic languages.  Sometimes it's possible to deduce what
inflectional vowels would have probably been in PG from the way a word
is declined in one of the later languages, even if the vowel itself
has been lost; e.g. you can tell from the way Old Norse 'staðr'
"place" (cognate with Modern Endlish 'stead') is declined that
(barring quirks) it would have come from PG *stadiz rather than
*stadaz or something else.  Luckily with this one, there are cognates
elsewhere in Germanic which confirm this.

If the word survives in Modern English, there are lots of etymological
dictionaries available which will help you find cognates, including
some free online [ http://www.etymonline.com/ ].  As far as I know,
teh most comprehensive English etymological dictionary is the Oxford
English Dictionary [ http://www.oed.com/ ], which can be found in
libraries or consulted online if you have a subscription, or via a
library or college or university that has a subscription.  There are
various more or less abbridged versions available at more affordable
prices which are very useful.  Some German dictionaries including the
Grimms' Deutsches Wörterbuch [
http://germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/WBB/woerterbuecher/ ].

Good luck!

LN

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