the Wheel and Dating PIE

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu> wrote:

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

>> 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.

The -gw- is Verner's law allright, but there is no Vernerless
variant with *h(w).    It's just that PIE *gwh (+ Verner *kw)
have no stable reflexes in Germanic (/g(w)/ or /w/).

>What I'd need to check is whether the Pre-PGmc word for "wheel" belonged
>to one of the paradigms with shifting stress;

It's an o-stem (fixed stress).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl