Fleshing out some grammar and runic orthography

[gutdwala]

I've been trying to flesh out some paradigms and I'm running into some sistuations I'm not sure how to deal with. If anyone could help me out, I'd greatly appreciate it.

I'm taking "dau" as the preterite of "diwan". David Salo's lessons give it as "daw", but "snau" is attested as the preterite form of "sniwan". Now the only attested instance of a vowel in the 2nd person preterite indicative is "sai-sost", so I would assume that "dau" and "snau" would then be "daust" in that form? Does that sound right? And would the imperatives then be "diw" and "sniw" or "diu" and "sniu"?

I feel a little uneasy about situations like "laikan" -> "lai-laikt". My gut is telling me it should be "lai-laiht", though I can't find any attestations or sound rules to either confirm or deny this. 

The preterite "lai-loun" is attested, for which Wright gives the infinitive of "lauan". Here, I would expect it to be "laian", similar to "waian". Is he reconstructing the infinitive based on a cognate in another Germanic language?

I'm also trying to map the elder futhark ato the sounds of Wulfila's Gothic. I'm not quite sure how to go about handling B when it's a voiced bilabial fricative and D when it's a voiced dental fricative. As far as I can tell, these sounds didn't exist in proto-germanic. "Tilarids" seems like it might be a clue that the D rune was used in the same way that Wulfila used D, but I'm assuming that the word would be "tilari©­s" and the same thing is going on when scribes write "merids" for "meri©­s". Using this reasoning, I would be inclined to use the B rune for both values of Wulfila's B also. Though the W rune seems like it might be an option for respresenting /¥â/. 

Wulfila's GG and GK also seem a little iffy to me. Would those sounds be written with the NG+G and NG+K runes respectively? "Marings" and "rango" are attested, being written out as M-A-R-NG-S and R-A-NG-O, with both using the ING bind rune and an inferred I to be in "marings" with no I to be in "rango". If we take "marings" to be written as Wulfilan "mariggs", that seems odd to me because I understand Wulfila's GG to represent the sound of /©¯/+/g/ rather than /©¯/ alone as the NG rune would indicate. If we do take the NG rune to be /©¯/+G, would we then write /©¯/+k with the runes NG+K or simple N+K as some of Wulfila's alternate spelling show? Of course, I would expect a certain degree of incosistency between people writing runes back then, but I'm wondering what would make the most sense as far as using what we do know about runic inscriptions to write Gothic as it's come down to us. 


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20090917/5be18947/attachment.htm>