"whose"

[David L. White]

> Not that it matters here, but wasn't the OE genitive form _hwæs_
> (_hwaes_, if your machine can't handle the digraph), which points to PIE
> _o_ rather than _e_?

> Leo Connolly

        Yes, the OE form is "hwaes", but I was (over-)generalizing to the
rest of Germanic, where /e/ seems to have been the rule.  The usual view is
that OE /ae/ got there simply by a difference of opinion about whether to
use /o/ or /e/ in IE.  Another possibility that occurs to me is that there
might have been a change of unstressed /e/ after /w/ (voiced or voiceless)
to /ae/, but I do not know if this checks.

Dr. David L. White