*gwh in Gmc.

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

On Tue, 06 Feb 2001 11:46:25 +0100, "Hans-Werner Hatting"
<hwhatting at hotmail.com> wrote:

>MCV wrote:

>>My original examples were: "liver", "four", "-leven, -lve", "oven",
>>"wolf", "leave"(?), "sieve"(?).  There's a labial in "wolf".

>There is also a labial in _four_ (PIE *kwetwor-).

As I realized minutes after sending my message.  Also, the word for
"oven" contains a labial vowel (IEW p. 88 *auqw(h)-:*uqw(h)-).

>But I take Your point.
>Labials in the neighbourhood alone are not sufficient as an explanation, as
>they don't account for Your other examples.
>So, what are our choices?

>1. To accept these as cases of "untriggered sporadic sound change", which
>is of course not satisfying;

>2. To try to extend the triggers for a sporadic sound change *kw > *p. One
>obvious candidate would be /l/. This would still leave "oven" and
>"sieve" unaccounted for. As I am without any library for the time being,
>what are the etymologies proposed for these words?

>3. We could assume substrate influences or a dialect mixture in Germanic or,
>in other words, a mixing of features from neighbouring dialects, like in,
>e.g., the German dialect of Cologne, where we generally have the development
>/t/ > /ts/, /s/ (e.g. _zick_ /tsik/ "time", NHG "Zeit", but /t/ is kept in
>some function words like _et_ "it", _dat_ "that"). But substrate and dialect
>influences are, of course, something of a "magic wand", if there is no further
>evidence for their existence.

>4. We reconstruct a new series of phonemes for PIE, as has been proposed.

We can read (1) as shorthand for (3), leaving only three
possibilities.

To answer your question, the word "sieve" is from *seip-/*seib-
"ausgiessen, seihen, rinnen, troepfeln" (Gmc. and Toch.), besides
*seikw-/[*seigw-] "ausgiessen, _seihen_, rinnen, traeufeln", which
_also_ has Germanic reflexes.  I must say that */l/ as an additional
factor sort of offers itself from my list, and can easily be justified
phonetically (labiaized or rather velarized /l/ is common enough).
But now I wpould have to look at all the Germanic reflexes of
*kw/*gw/*ghw again and check if we find counterexamples with PGmc
*/hw/ in the company of */l/ (or */w/, for that matter), for which I
don't have the time right now.  From memory, no such effect (*hw>*f)
is noticeable in the root for "wheel", but maybe *l has to preceed
*kw...

>My problem with approach no. 4 is that I don't know of any evidence for such
>a series other than from Germanic.

Well, most of the words in my list offer sporadic cases of */p/ in
lgs. outside Germanic (as well as variants with */hw/ in Germanic).
Arm. <leard> "liver" can be either *lepr.t or *lekwr.t.  Both *leip-
and *leikw- occur in most IE branches.  For "oven", we have Grk.
<ipnos>, Bret. <offen> (as well as Goth. <auhns>).  *seip- is alo in
Tocharian (and *seikw- also in Germanic).  "Wolf" has forms with *p in
Latin and a similar root (*wlp-) exists in I-I, Grk, Arm. etc. with
the meaning "fox" or "jackal".

> If we assume that Germanic branched off
>earliest (a problematic assumption in itself), we would not expect such
>evidence, but in the scenario Douglas Kilday describes, we would expect some
>traces of the /pw/ series in Anatolian. And, I don't want to repeat myself,
>but I think the sound change /pw/ > /kw/ is not trivial  I would expect
>different outcomes in different branches of IE languages, not a simple split
>into a language keeping the series distinct, and the other ones merging
>them.

My proposal makes the most sense within a wider context where _all_
(pre-)PIE consonants had labialized (and palatalized) variants.  This
would be comparable to the developments that can be seen later in Old
Irish (3-way split between "slender", "broad" and "u-coloured"
consonants) or in Tocharian.  The Tocharian case (where *i, *u and *e
merged as *@ (*a"), or rather: *e > *@, *i > *(y)@, *u > *(w)@) is
especially interesting, given the lack of *i and *u in PIE
[full-grade] root structure (so maybe **CiC > *C(y)eC, **CuC >
*C(w)eC).  As was the case in Old Irish and pre-Tocharian, such a
system with a 3-way opposition was inherently unstable, and was
eventually resolved leaving a number of irregularities.  The
alternations between *p and *kw (with Germanic mostly, but not always,
on the *p-side, the other lgs. mostly, but not always, on the
*kw-side) can be interpreted that way, as can other PIE irregularities
(e.g. *t ~ *s < *tw (cf. the Greek soundlaw *tw > s) in the words for
"month", "dawn", the pf. act. ptc. in *-wot-/*-us-, etc.; *n ~ *i <
*n^ in roots like *nem-/*yem-/*em- and the Vedic *-i/*-n-stems; *l ~
*i < *l^ in the "liver" word, maybe also in "yoke"; *m ~ *w < *mw in
the 1 sg., du. and pl. of the verb, etc.).

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