NW vs. E Gmc

[Stanley Friesen]

At 01:43 PM 1/24/00 -0600, CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU wrote:
>The better reason is that the defining features of East Germanic -- funny
>vocalism, almost complete devoicing of final stops and fricatives, peculiar
>vocabulary -- are precisely *not* shared with North Germanic, which in all
>these points agrees better with West Germanic.  Neither is the almost complete
>elimination of grammatischer Wechsel in strong verbs, clearly a Gothic
>innovation that was not extended to modal verbs.  But Sean is right that the
>(probable) loans prove nothing.

However, all of these are retained *ancestral* features in non-Gothic, and
so tell us nothing about branching sequence.  As autapomorphies in Gothic,
they just define Gothic, they contain no information about its relationships.

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May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com