the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Sean Crist]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> "Eduard Selleslagh" <edsel at glo.be> wrote:

>> What I meant was this (I'm sorry for having been so elliptic), and you may
>> agree or not: *kwekwlo (or *kwekulo) looks to me like a reduplicated form,
>> probably inspired by the reconstruction from Grk. kyklos. Indeed, it is the
>> logical thing to assume if you try to reconstruct from Germanic (Eng. wheel,
>> or Du. wiel < hwi:l- < *kwelo)

> Only ON hwel < *kwelo-.  The English and Dutch vowels can only
> derive from *ew.  The development was: *kwekwlo- > *hwegwlo ~
> *hweGwlo > *hwewlo > { OE hwe:ol > wheel | ODu. *hwi at l > wiel }.

> Curiously, the loss of -g- here is only semi-regular (or we
> wouldn't have OE hweogul), which makes me wonder why Szemere'nyi,
> in his "Introduction", chose this example to illustrate the
> regularity of sound laws in general

Looks like a Verner's Law variant to me, tho I'd have to hit the books to
see if it actually checks out.  In Proto-Germanic, you could very well get
a *g/*h alternation within a noun paradigm because of Verner's Law (the
*h, of course, was deleted between two vowels in OE, so that something
like *hweohul > *hwe:ol).  Most cases of Verner's Law variation within
noun paradigms were destroyed by analogy, but there wouldn't be anything
surprising about both variants managing to survive into historical times.

Another case is point is the word for "tooth"; both Verner's Law variants
survived into Gothic.  One of the variants got fossilized as the second
element of the compound name of some kind of flower.  (Sorry not to be
more specific; I don't have time to dig out the actual forms at the
moment.)

What I'd need to check is whether the Pre-PGmc word for "wheel" belonged
to one of the paradigms with shifting stress; if it did, I'd attribute
hwe:ol/hweogul to Verner's Law.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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