zompist bboard

It has apparently been claimed that the following innovation is common to the West Germanic languages: Change of /lþ/ to stop /ld/ (except word-finally). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages#Linguistic_developments Huh. Good to know. Would be nice if Wikipedia could standardise their so...

Could also be analogy from inflected or derived forms with the alternant. Wiktionary actually suggests the entire plural in PGmc was in -d. But actually in this case a better question might be why we reconstruct it with /T/ at all. Given that it's been allegedly independently replaced by the form i...

There are some Germanic etymological dictionaries with Proto-Germanic lemmas (at least two fairly recent): Orel, Vladimir (2003) – A handbook of germanic etymology https://archive.org/details/Orel-AHandbookOfGermanicEtymology Kroonen, Guus (2013) – Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic Fick, Fal...

I think KathTheDragon is correct about the term verba pura . Originally, the term seems to have been used in reference to Greek verb with a vowel before the ending (including before a thematic vowel), which frequently contract. See for example: https://books.google.se/books?id=viYtAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA52#v...

To try to answer your second question, the PN form <swestar> is difficult to explain.

This is from Martin Syrett (1994) — The Unaccented Vowels of Proto-Norse:

The chronology of vowel loss between PG and Old Norse is thought to have been something like this (we can date the sound changes from inscriptions, but of course, they may not give a complete picture of all the variation in the spoken language): Common germanic syncope (the first centuries AD): In a...

1) Given that unstressed /u/ has generally been syncopated by the Old Norse period (e.g. *winuR > vinr ), why does hǫfuð still retain /u/? Syncope after short syllables supposedly happened later than after long syllables, but the related haufuð also retains /u/. According to Wiktionary , this latte...