Principles of reconstruction.

[llama_nom]

--- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, Justïn <justinelf at ...> wrote:
>
> Okay, Prim. Germanic, I'm finding, is *batham.

Good, you're on target so far.

> So...I'm looking 
> through Wright's Grammar...and I'm a little overwhelmed...It's been a 
> little more than 20 minutes and, as it's not the most user friendly 
> text, I'm not sure where to find something that actually compares PG to 
> how it evolved into Gothic.

Yeah, it took me a while to find my way around there too.  Be patient,
explore, and feel free to ask here if you have any questions.  If I
hear of a short cut, I'll let you know...  Meanwhile, try § 161 on p.
76 in Ch. IX "The Gothic Development of the General Germanic
Consonant-System", which refers back to § 132 on the history of
Proto-Germanic *'b'.  The gist is this: initial 'b' in English
corresponds to Gothic 'b' (as in Go. 'broþar' : Modern English
'brother')--no catch there.

> I found a comparison chart but it didn't 
> tell me what to do with initial B, medial TH, or final -M, let alone 
> the morpheme -AM, so I'm a little lost right now...

The *'am' inflexion indicates that the word is what Wright calls a
neuter a-stem (some books cite this ending as *'an', a later form). 
When Wright talks about a-stems, he means words that had *'a' before
certain endings in Proto-Germanic, words such as the masculine
*dag-a-z and the neuter *wurd-a-m / *wurd-a-n.  The reason for
reconstructing this ending is (1) the fact that the word is neuter and
declined like other words known to belong to this group in the early
Germanic language where it occurs; (2) lack of other sound changes
such as doubling (=gemination) of the 'þ', or i-mutation of the root
vowel, that would suggest a different ending; (3) comparison with the
corresponding group of neuter nouns other Indo-European languages
(e.g. Latin 2nd declension nouns ending in -um, Greek in -on, Sanskrit
in -am).

Just to confuse things further, some books give slightly different
names to the declensions based on the vowels that they had in
Proto-Indo-European rather than what the vowels were in
Proto-Germanic.  So here, for example, Lehmann uses the term o-stems
where Wright uses a-stems; Lehmann has â-stems (hopefully that should
come out as an 'a' with a macron (a horizontal line over it) where
Wright uses the term ô-stems.  That's because PIE 'o' became PG 'a',
and PIE 'â' became PG 'ô'.  Right now, that probably seems impossibly
complicated, but once you get to finding your way around the Gothic
paradigms, and the grammar of early Germanic languages in general, it
will be fairly obvious which system someone is using.

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/pgmc03.html#3_3_1
http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/books/pgmc00.html

Wright's Ch. V "The Gothic Development of the Primative Germanic
Vowels in Unaccented Syllables", § 87.1 is the place to look for this:
"Final -m became -n. [...] final -n, was dropped in prim. Germanic
[i.e. Proto-Germanic] after short vowels and the preceding vowel
underwent the same treatment in Gothic as if it had been originally
final, i.e. it was dropped with the exception of 'u' [...]"  Which
gives us Gothic *'baþ' (*'bath'), a strong neuter noun belonging to
the a-stem declension (Wright § 181-2, pp. 86-7).

> I really, really want to do this, so I'm looking more for a hint than 
> the answer, really...but just very overwhelmed.  I wish I'd been able 
> to study linguistics more but determined to learn this with or without 
> the best formal education.

Everyone's got to start somewhere.  I was just as confused a few years
ago!

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