Principles of reconstruction.

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Justïn <justinelf at ...> wrote:
>
> Is number 2. not triu?  I stumbled across it in the Wright link 
> actually, but I may be mistaken.  Would 6. be aul?  This is really 
> embarrassing...I'm working on the rest, at work right now so far away 
> from my Bennett text...
> Again, this is my first attempt, so as embarrassing as it is 
> hopefully I'll learn...

Ah, no need for embarrassment!  I was just thinking of it as an
excercise in phonetic reconstruction.  In other words, what would a
Gothic cognate of (word descended from the same Proto-Germanic
ancestor as) Modern English 'wood' look like?  But you're right 'triu'
does mean "a tree" or "a stick".  I guess that illustrates another
issue in reconstruction: where a word already exists in the same
semantic field, how might that have related to the meaning of a
hypothetical, reconstructed Gothic cognate?  Does that make sense?

In this case, it seems that the better attested early Germanic
languages did have a few partly overlapping words in this senantic
field, e.g. Old Norse has a word 'viðr' which is cognate with 'wood',
as well as a word 'tré' congate with English 'tree'.  So there's
nothing improbably about supposing Gothic had cognates for both, even
though only one, 'triu', is recorded.

Number 6 is probably the sneakiest one; um, sorry about that... 
('bath' is much simpler!)  A few different derivatives exist in
Germanic from the same (probbaly onomatapoeic) root, but working back
from Modern English 'owl', Old Saxon 'ûuuila', Old High German 'ûwila'
you could reconstruct Proto-Germanic *'uwwilôn', or for English
perhaps *'uwwalôn', since it doesn't show i-mutation (=i-umlaut) of
the root vowel.  The Scandinavian forms also lack i-mutation, and thus
might also come from a form without 'i' in the suffix.  Alternatively
the lack of i-mutation in OE and ON might be due to an early loss of
the medial (middle syllable) vowel -i- in the suffix.  So I'd
tentatively go with Proto-Germanic *'uwwilôn' (weak noun, feminine
on-stem), but keep an open mind that a Gothic derivative might have
existed with a different vowel (namely a back vowel) in the suffix in
place of 'i'.  The clue to the root of the hypothetical Gothic form
though is in Old Norse 'ugla' and especially (Old) Swedish 'uggla'. 
These show a sound change common to North and East Germanic whereby
'ww' > 'ggw', as described by Wright.  In Old Norse, the medial vowel
of the suffix has been lost, which is normal, but presumably it would
have been present in Gothic (compare 'mawilo' "little girl"), and the
'w' has been dropped, as always between two consonants.  So, I'd
reconstruct Gothic *'uggwilo': weak noun, feminine on-stem, i.e.
declined like 'mawilo', 'tuggo', etc.  One last clue is the Catalan
word 'òliba', which it's been suggested may be derived from the Gothic
word for owl [
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0406&L=gothic-l&P=284
].  If so, it's obviously been through some rearrangement, so we
probably can't read too much into this, but still, it does have 'i'
for its medial vowel.  I wonder if any earlier forms of this word are
recorded.  Anyway, that's what I'd do.

LN

 
> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell@> wrote:
> >
> > 
> > Clue for Number 6: see Wright § 151.
> > 
> > http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/png/goth_wright/b0071.png
> > http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/png/goth_wright/b0072.png
> > 
> > Clue for Number 4: compare the Modern English verb 'to lay' and 
> cognates.
> > 
> > > 1. bath
> > > 2. wood
> > > 3. dwarf
> > > 4. edge
> > > 5. elbow
> > > 6. owl



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