prat(t)

["Alfred W. Tüting"]

>Now I'm embarrassed, except for the fact that none of the rest of you
caught this before I did.  All the forms (of German Pracht, praechtig)
in the list that Alfred sent except the modern German one begin with
/b/, not /p/; the /p/ must be the result of some kind of dialect
borrowing or other irregularity in the history of German; it's not the
second sound shift (Hochdeutsche Lautverschiebung), unless I really have
forgotten everything I once knew about the histories of these languages.
  So English prat and German Pracht can't be directly cognate -- English
should have /b/ or German should have /pf/. <<

Sorry, too ;-), as last night, it came to my mind that the shift of
Latin /f/ to Middle High German /b/ (braht) etc. was not the problem,
but that of /b/ -> /p/ in German. (If I'm not mistaken, I found another
example of - maybe? - this kind: l. fungus -> boletus -> Pilz
(mushroom); but it might be that fungus and boletus are not at all
cognates. BTW, the final consonant in German Pilz is /ts/ (cf. Romanian
bureti, pl. with the l. /t/ shifting to /ts/ before /i/ [bure'ts]).

Yet, we'd better stick to Siouan ;-)


Alfred