Principles of reconstruction.

[ualarauans]

Excellent, Llama! Can we save it as a FAQ, somehow?

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell at ...> wrote:
>
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Justïn <justinelf@> 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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